Menu
grep command is really powerful and I use it a lot.
Sometime I have the necessity to find something with grep looking inside many many files to find the string I barely remember helping myself with -i (ignore case) option, -r (recursive) and also -v (exclude).
But what I really need is to have a special output from grep which highlight the matching line(s) plus the neighbourhood lines (given the matching line I'd like to see, let's say, the 2 preceding and the 2 subsequent lines).
Is there a way to get this result using bash?
906
For BSD or GNU grep you can use -B num to set how many lines before the match and -A num for the number of lines after the match. If you want the same number of lines before and after you can use -C num . This will show 3 lines before and 3 lines after.
Use the -A argument to grep to specify how many lines beyond the match to output. And use -B n to grep lines before the match. And -C in grep to add lines both above and below the match!
grep is a command line text searching utility that is able to find patterns and strings in files and other types of input. Most matches will match on one line only, but it's often useful to match across multiple new lines.
Grep itself will do this
grep -A 2 -B 2 foo myfile.txt
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
