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user1046658
Asked: 2020-08-10 13:46:02 +0800 CST

How to search for a word in a file but also show the whole file along with the found word?

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I am using Ubuntu 16.04.

I want to search for a certain word, but I also want the whole file that contains the word to be outputted on the terminal so that I can see where in the file the word is located. However, when I use grep, it will only show the particular sentence that contains the word, not the whole file.

What command can I use to search for a word but also show the whole file along with the place where the word is located?

command-line bash grep

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    With grep you can use:

    $ grep -E -e 'pattern' -e '$' file

    or in a simplified form:

    $ grep -E 'pattern|$' file

    Technically this would work too:

    $ grep -E 'pattern|^' file

    or even : grep -E 'pattern|' file. It says lines with pattern or no pattern at all. so everything will match.

    I have grep aliased to grep --color=always, so if you don't you have to pass the color option yourself.

    With less:

    $ less -p 'pattern' file

    So the file would pop-up in less, the desired term would be highlighted and you can use n and shift+n to jump around between matches.

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  2. Edit: I misinterpreted the question in my original answer.... I have edited it to produce the desired result... I was only showing the file name in the output. I edited this answer to use that output to show the entire file by using less (as Ravexina's answer suggests)
    ...in addition, this will only return the files (in less) that have been matched by grep when searching through a directory(s).
    ....and I added -I to ignore binary files, they may make the less interaction messy. Remove it if you need to search binary files or files that grep may "think" are binary.

    Use the "with-filename" flag with grep to show the file. (the flag is -H)

    I am assuming you are combing through a directory and each of the files in them. If searching outside of current directory, use the * to prevent "is a directory" error with no results.

    grep -HI pattern /directory/* | less -p pattern $(awk -F ":" '{print $1}')

    or

    grep --with-filename -I pattern /directory/* | less -p pattern $(awk -F ":" '{print $1}')

    or if drilling down into sub-directories...

    grep -rHI pattern /directory/* | less -p pattern $(awk -F ":" '{print $1}')

    I don't like entering the pattern twice, it could use improvement

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  3. If you want to see where in the file your searched text is use C flag. For example:

    grep -C 5 'MySearchText' *

    will show the line containing the text and five lines before and five lines after the intended search.

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  4. To complement the other answers: you can add '-n' to the options to see the line numbers on the left:

    grep -n -C 3  "something"  filename

    will show you lines containing "something", with 3 lines of "Context" (ie, 3 lines before and after the one(s) matching "something"), and each shown lines will have its line number appended at the beginning.

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