Comments on: grep is a beautiful tool

By: links for 2009-03-04 | it's about time

links for 2009-03-04 | it's about time — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 10:02:56 +0000

[...] grep is a beautiful tool – Eric Wendelin’s Blog Global Regular Expression Print is a staple of every command-line user’s toolbox. As with find, it derives a lot of power from being combined with other tools and can increase your productivity significantly. Following is a simple tutorial that will help you realize the power of this simple and most useful command. (tags: reference howto tutorial linux unix bash shell commands grep) [...]

By: richard

richard — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 02:24:07 +0000

I would like to have a conversion doc to transcribe from OS 9 arabic fonts to OS X arabic fonts. I wrote a page of equivalences a=^ and in BBedit noticed grep has a base there but how would I write a command line such that all the individual letters change at once? Or can i pay someone to write it?
thanks

By: Discovering the beauty of grep

Discovering the beauty of grep — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 05:22:29 +0000

[...] This blog post offers a great introduction to grep. I’m definitely going to have to give it a close read, and try to improve my skills with this tool. [...]

By: henrikb

henrikb — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 14:45:11 +0000

Noticed that my example was a bit unclear, so here is a clarified version
grep -r -n --include=*.java synchronized ~/src
which finds all occurences of the synchronized keyword.

Since I love to promote Emacs as the perfect editor, I should also mention that you, ofcourse(!), can grep for the word under the cursor by supplying an argument to the ‘ESC x grep’ command. This is easily done by executing ‘C-u M-x grep’, which replaces the pattern of the last grep command with the word under the cursor. Very efficient…

By: henrikb

henrikb — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 14:36:42 +0000

Don’t think anyone mentioned the –include option of grep, which avoids matches in unrelated files such as svn-stuff, etc.
grep -r ~/src --include=*.java.
You can include multiple –include= statements and the complment –exclude is also available.

As a side note, for Emacs users, there is a nice *grep* buffer which contains the result of your last grep, provided you execute via ‘ESC x grep’. When running grep like this from Emacs, you also have access to a searchable(!) grep-history with your previous grep commands. You navigate in the grep history by using ESC p (previous), ESC n (next) and ESC r (reverse search).

By: Vim is a beautiful tool

Vim is a beautiful tool — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:28:17 +0000

[...] you are there check out some of his other articles. There are some great ones on grep, sed, awk, and lots [...]

By: Vasudev Ram

Vasudev Ram — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 22:18:00 +0000

Since someone above asked, for non UNIX/Linux platforms – at least Windows – an alternative to installing Cygwin – which is somewhat big – if you don’t need the rest of it’s functionality, is to search for and download any one of a number of DOS / Windows grep clones. One simple way to get a good one is to download Turbo C 2.x from the Borland Museum (Borland’s development tools division is now CodeGear which is now part of Embarcadero Technologies). Google for “Borland Museum” or search around on CodeGear.com to get the download link. Turbo C comes with a GREP.COM utility – though it was for DOS, it still works at the Windows COMMAND prompt (which is basically a DOS emulation in Windows). And it has a “-d” option, IIRC, which is equivalent to “grep -r”. You can delete the installed Turbo C if you don’t want it, after copying the GREP.COM somewhere else in your PATH.

Similarly, I’ve found and used DOS/Windows clones of awk and sed. The GNUWin32 project also has a collection of ports (to Windows) some of the classic UNIX command-line tools, IIRC. For example, here is its port of grep:

http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/grep.htm

- Vasudev Ram
http://www.dancingbison.com

By: awk is a beautiful tool

awk is a beautiful tool — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 16:06:47 +0000

[...] Find is a beautiful toolgrep is a beautiful toolWhat I wanted to know before I left college: A programmer reflectsEarly Adopters: Your Firefox 3 [...]