Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 12:50:04 +0930 From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> To: Toby Irvine <tobyirvine@hotmail.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Using grep (was: Please help me) Message-ID: <20021010032004.GF87617@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <F5z5b6KZmcK8r6beUzm00000029@hotmail.com> References: <F5z5b6KZmcK8r6beUzm00000029@hotmail.com>
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On Wednesday, 9 October 2002 at 23:08:52 -0400, Toby Irvine wrote: > I have one question for you. I have been looking to find out what the > command/utility "grep" actually means or stands for. I have searched the > net and keep finding the same answer, which I have been told is wrong. > Could you please help me out and let me know. Someone told me that only an > old school unix person would be able to tell me. Please help? You'll get better replies if you use a subject line which explains what you're looking for. This is pretty much a generic question: "What does <foo> do?". There's also a generic answer: RTFM, more specifically in your case: $ man grep That may be a little hard to read, and it's certainly valid to come back here and say "I don't understand the man page". The main use of grep is as a filter: you feed it with lines of text, and it gives back the ones that match certain criteria. For example, taking this message up to this point (the file name message below), you could do: $ grep generic message $ grep foo message $ grep message message -- When replying to this message, please copy the original recipients. If you don't, I may ignore the reply or reply to the original recipients. For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/questions.html See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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