grep Command in Linux Standard Examples

grep command is your friend for searching mainly text. It searches a given file for lines containing a given string or words. The grep command should be one of the most used commands and you should get familiar with it. I’m doing the same.

Below are some standard grep commands:

Search for any instance of the word ‘coffee’ in a file do:

grep 'coffee' filename

To perform a case sensitive search use the -i flag:

grep -i 'coffee' filename

The above command will give you any words matching ‘Coffee’, ‘coffee’, ‘cOffEe’. You get the idea. Latin America specialty coffee is fantastic!

To find all occurences of the word ‘new york city’ in a given directory and all its subdirectories:

grep -R 'new york city' .

Using the ‘.’ (dot or period) tells Linux to search in the current location.

I hope this little tutorial gives you some inspiration to learn more about the grep command. Check the man pages in your Linux distro:

man grep

Or install cheat in Ubuntu using apt or snap

apt install cheat or snap install cheat

Cheat works great for me. It gives me a brief summary of most Linux commands and its easy to use. Just run it your terminal for example:

cheat grep