PCREGREP(1)PCREGREP(1)NAMEpcregrep - a grep with Perl-compatible regular expressions.
SYNOPSISpcregrep [-Vcfhilnrsvx] pattern [file] ...
DESCRIPTIONpcregrep searches files for character patterns, in the same way as
other grep commands do, but it uses the PCRE regular expression library
to support patterns that are compatible with the regular expressions of
Perl 5. See pcre(3) for a full description of syntax and semantics.
If no files are specified, pcregrep reads the standard input. By
default, each line that matches the pattern is copied to the standard
output, and if there is more than one file, the file name is printed
before each line of output. However, there are options that can change
how pcregrep behaves.
Lines are limited to BUFSIZ characters. BUFSIZ is defined in <stdio.h>.
The newline character is removed from the end of each line before it is
matched against the pattern.
OPTIONS-V Write the version number of the PCRE library being used to
the standard error stream.
-c Do not print individual lines; instead just print a count of
the number of lines that would otherwise have been printed.
If several files are given, a count is printed for each of
them.
-ffilename
Read patterns from the file, one per line, and match all pat‐
terns against each line. There is a maximum of 100 patterns.
Trailing white space is removed, and blank lines are ignored.
An empty file contains no patterns and therefore matches
nothing.
-h Suppress printing of filenames when searching multiple files.
-i Ignore upper/lower case distinctions during comparisons.
-l Instead of printing lines from the files, just print the
names of the files containing lines that would have been
printed. Each file name is printed once, on a separate line.
-n Precede each line by its line number in the file.
-r If any file is a directory, recursively scan the files it
contains. Without -r a directory is scanned as a normal file.
-s Work silently, that is, display nothing except error mes‐
sages. The exit status indicates whether any matches were
found.
-v Invert the sense of the match, so that lines which do not
match the pattern are now the ones that are found.
-x Force the pattern to be anchored (it must start matching at
the beginning of the line) and in addition, require it to
match the entire line. This is equivalent to having ^ and $
characters at the start and end of each alternative branch in
the regular expression.
SEE ALSOpcre(3), Perl 5 documentation
DIAGNOSTICS
Exit status is 0 if any matches were found, 1 if no matches were found,
and 2 for syntax errors or inacessible files (even if matches were
found).
AUTHOR
Philip Hazel <ph10@cam.ac.uk>
Last updated: 15 August 2001
Copyright (c) 1997-2001 University of Cambridge.
PCREGREP(1)
