Tools

How to use grep (with examples)

Grep is a powerful utility on Linux. Want to get more out of the tool? This article will show you how to use it including many practical examples.

Summary

The grep command is one of the oldest tools for Linux and other platforms. Actually, it is older than Linux itself. It was written by Ken Thompson more than 45 years ago! The name grep stands for “globally regular expression print”. This name comes from its predecessor ed and the specific mode in which you would globally search, using a regular expression, and print the output. The related command was “g/re/p”.