Added on May 9th, 2015 and marked as grep regex

Anyone that uses the unix command line on a regular basis will probably also use grep a lot to search input files for a certain string. I use it many times each day, but somehow didn’t bother to improve my “grep fu”.

Since I rather match too much than too little, I usually give grep a slightly too generic search string and have it look in more files than really is necessary. Then I will patiently step through the results to get to the file I’m looking for. (You’ll probably already see several parts where this can be improved.)

Pipes, pipes, pipes

To drill down into the results of a grep on the text FIRST_STRING, I usually piped it to another grep command and then searched for the text SECOND_STRING.

grep FIRST_STRING /path/to/files/ -R | grep SECOND_STRING

And if you needed to eliminate even more matches from the result set, you could add more pipes.

Regular expressions

But grep has the option to search for patterns that contain a regular expression. (It’s the re in grep.) Why not use that feature to get rid of the pipe structure? Then we have the following single command:

grep FIRST_STRING.*SECOND_STRING /path/to/files/ -R

This will only match patterns where SECOND_STRING will follow FIRST_STRING, not the other way around. This is how I would use the pipe-method anyway, so for me that’s no big deal.

Ack

And of course, this also works with ack:

ack FIRST_STRING.*SECOND_STRING /path/to/files/