How to grep an exact string with slash in it?

Question

I'm running macOS.

There are the following strings:

/superman

/superman1

/superman/batman

/superman2/batman

/superman/wonderwoman

/superman3/wonderwoman

/batman/superman

/batman/superman1

/wonderwoman/superman

/wonderwoman/superman2

I want to grep only the bolded words.

I figured doing grep -wr 'superman/|/superman' would yield all of them, but it only yields /superman.

Any idea how to go about this?

Answer 1

You may use

grep -E '(^|/)superman($|/)' file

See the online demo:

s="/superman
/superman1
/superman/batman
/superman2/batman
/superman/wonderwoman
/superman3/wonderwoman
/batman/superman
/batman/superman1
/wonderwoman/superman
/wonderwoman/superman2"
grep -E '(^|/)superman($|/)' <<< "$s"

Output:

/superman
/superman/batman
/superman/wonderwoman
/batman/superman
/wonderwoman/superman

The pattern matches

• (^|/) - start of string or a slash
• superman - a word
• ($|/) - end of string or a slash.