__/ [ Tim Smith ] on Wednesday 03 May 2006 04:04 \__
> In article <618li3-e0o.ln1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
> The Ghost In The Machine <ewill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> > Can grep return just the word that matches the pattern, or can it only
>> > return the whole line?
>> >
> ...
>>
>> For details on any of these, 'man grep', 'man sed', or
>> 'man bash' (as bash handles the redirects).
>
> One thing to keep in mind, though. If you need to do anything that you
> can't very quickly see how to do in grep or sed or whatever, then it
> often will be faster to write a little Perl script, rather than dig
> through the zillion options of grep, etc., trying to find the
> combination that does what you want.
Au comtraire. In defence of grep, its basic use is simple enough to appeal to
command-line newbies:
grep file 'search phrase' (or regular expression, if you must)
This is quicker to do than opening a file, opening search prompt/widget, then
entering phrase. Also, grep is less computationally hungry.
Then come to consider extensibility, recursion, batch mode (including
scriptability), and multi-file operations. When someone sought the code of
an error message in WordPress, for example, I immediately ran:
grep -r * 'error message substring'
to find the line in a file within a subdirectory.
That's not too complex, yet the level of expressiveness is high.
Best wishes,
Roy
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