This is a common problem I encounter when using grep. Say the pattern is 'chr1' in a third column of a file, when I do the following:
grep 'chr1' file
How can I avoid getting the results including chr10, chr11, chr13 etc as well?
Thanks!
It seems this works:
grep -w 'chr1' file
Since you're interested in values in specific columns, you're much better off using awk:
awk '$3 == "chr1"' file
Related
I have found on this answer the regex to find a string between two characters. In my case I want to find every pattern between ‘ and ’. Here's the regex :
(?<=‘)(.*?)(?=’)
Indeed, it works when I try it on https://regex101.com/.
The thing is I want to use it with grep but it doesn't work :
grep -E '(?<=‘)(.*?)(?=’)' file
Is there anything missing ?
Those are positive look-ahead and look behind assertions. You need to enable it using PCRE(Perl Compatible Regex) and perhaps its better to get only matching part using -o option in GNU grep:
grep -oP '(?<=‘)(.*?)(?=’)' file
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I can read code and figure it out, but I have trouble writing from scratch.
I need help starting a ksh script that would search a file for multiple strings and write each line containing one of those strings to an output file.
If I use the following command:
$ grep "search pattern" file >> output file
...that does what I want it to. But I need to search multiple strings, and write the output in the order listed in the file.
Again... any help would be great! Thank you in advance!
Have a look at the regular expression manuals. You can specify multiple strings in the search expression such as grep "John|Bill"
Man grep will teach you a lot about regular expressions, but there are several online sites where you try them out, such as regex101 and (more colorful) regexr.
Sometimes you need egrep.
egrep "first substring|second substring" file
When you have a lot substrings you can put them in a variable first
findalot="first substring|second substring"
findalot="${findalot}|third substring"
findalot="${findalot}|find me too"
skipsome="notme"
skipsome="${skipsome}|dirty words"
egrep "${findalot}" file | egrep -v "${skipsome}"
Use "-f" in grep .
Write all the strings you want to match in a file ( lets say pattern_file , the list of strings should be one per line)
and use grep like below
grep -f pattern_file file > output_file
I am trying to grep the output of a command that outputs unknown text and a directory per line. Below is an example of what I mean:
.MHuj.5.. /var/log/messages
The text and directory may be different from time to time or system to system. All I want to do though is be able to grep the directory out and send it to a variable.
I have looked around but cannot figure out how to grep to the end of a word. I know I can start the search phrase looking for a "/", but I don't know how to tell grep to stop at the end of the word, or if it will consider the next "/" a new word or not. The directories listed could change, so I can't assume the same amount of directories will be listed each time. In some cases, there will be multiple lines listed and each will have a directory list in it's output. Thanks for any help you can provide!
If your directory paths does not have spaces then you can do:
$ echo '.MHuj.5.. /var/log/messages' | awk '{print $NF}'
/var/log/messages
It's not clear from a single example whether we can generalize that e.g. the first occurrence of a slash marks the beginning of the data you want to extract. If that holds, try
grep -o '/.*' file
To fetch everything after the last space, try
grep -o '[^ ]*$' file
For more advanced pattern matching and extraction, maybe look at sed, or Awk or Perl or Python.
Your line can be described as:
^\S+\s+(\S+)$
That's assuming whitespace is your delimiter between the random text and the directory. It simply separates the whitespace from the non-whitespace and captures the second part.
Or you might want to look into the word boundary character class: \b.
I know you said to use grep, but I can't help to mention that this is trivially done using awk:
awk '{ print $NF }' input.txt
This is assuming that a whitespace is the delimiter and that the path does not contain any whitespaces.
What is the way to use 'grep' to search for combinations of a pattern in a text file?
Say, for instance I am looking for "by the way" and possible other combinations like "way by the" and "the way by"
Thanks.
Awk is the tool for this, not grep. On one line:
awk '/by/ && /the/ && /way/' file
Across the whole file:
gawk -v RS='\0' '/by/ && /the/ && /way/' file
Note that this is searching for the 3 words, not searching for combinations of those 3 words with spaces between them. Is that what you want?
Provide more details including sample input and expected output if you want more help.
The simplest approach is probably by using regexps. But this is also slightly wrong:
egrep '([ ]*(by|the|way)\>){3}'
What this does is to match on the group of your three words, taking spaces in front of the words
with it (if any) and forcing it to be a complete word (hence the \> at the end) and matching the string if any of the words in the group occurs three times.
Example of running it:
$ echo -e "the the the\nby the\nby the way\nby the may\nthe way by\nby the thermo\nbypass the thermo" | egrep '([ ]*(by|the|way)\>){3}'
the the the
by the way
the way by
As already said, this procudes a 'false' positive for the the the but if you can live with that, I'd recommend doing it this way.
Is there any way to do the opposite of showing only the matching part of strings in grep (the -o flag), that is, show everything except the part that matches the regex?
That is, the -v flag is not the answer, since that would not show files containing the match at all, but I want to show these lines, but not the part of the line that matches.
EDIT: I wanted to use grep over sed, since it can do "only-matching" matches on multi-line, with:
cat file.xml|grep -Pzo "<starttag>.*?(\n.*?)+.*?</starttag>"
This is a rather unusual requirement, I don't think grep would alternate the strings like that. You can achieve this with sed, though:
sed -n 's/$PATTERN//gp' file
EDIT in response to OP's edit:
You can do multiline matching with sed, too, if the file is small enough to load it all into memory:
sed -rn ':r;$!{N;br};s/<starttag>.*?(\n.*?)+.*?<\/starttag>//gp' file.xml
You can do that with a little help from sed:
grep "pattern" input_file | sed 's/pattern//g'
I don't think there is a way in grep.
If you use ack, you could output Perl's special variables $` and $' variables to show everything before and after the match, respectively:
ack string --output="\$`\$'"
Similarly if you wanted to output what did match along with other text, you could use $& which contains the matched string;
ack string --output="Matched: $&"