PCREGREP(1)PCREGREP(1)NAMEpcregrep - a grep with Perl-compatible regular expres
sions.
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 patterns 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 com
parisons.
-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 messages. 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)
