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Ant's
Asked: 2012-09-05 19:32:16 +0800 CST

How do I fetch only numbers in grep?

  • 772

I have file like this :

 other lines . . .    
 blah blah blah (:34)

I wish to find the occurrence of numbers in the above file. I came up with:

grep [0-9] filename

But that is printing the whole:

blah blah blah (:34)

Rather I want only 34. Is there any way to do so?

command-line

5 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You can use grep -E to access the extended regular expression syntax( Same as egrep)

    I have created a testfile with below contents:

    >cat testfile
this is some text
with some random lines

again some text
ok now going for numbers (:32)
ok now going for numbers (:12)
ok now going for numbers (:132)
ok now going for numbers (:1324)

    Now to grep the numbers alone from the text you can use 

    >grep -Eo '[0-9]{1,4}' testfile
32
12
132
1324

    will be output.

    Here "-o" is used to only output the matching segment of the line, rather than the full contents of the line.

    The squiggly brackets (e.g. { and }) indicate the number of instances of the match. {1,4} requires that the previous character or character class must occur at least once, but no more than four times.

    Hope this helps

    • 131

  2. You can use RE bracket expression [:digit:] specified by section 9.3.5 of POSIX standard , in combination with -o flag to print only matching "words"

    $ grep -o '[[:digit:]]*' <<< $'No number in this line\nbut 123 here'                                                     
123
    • 20

  3. You can use Perl style regular expressions as well

    grep -Po "\\d+" filename

    -P Interpret PATTERNS as Perl-compatible regular expressions (PCREs).

    -o Print only the matched (non-empty) parts of a matching line, with each such part on a separate output line.

    • 12

  4. grep -o will print only the matching part of the line. Otherwise grep will print any lines with the pattern.

    • 7

  5. I would use curl to access your file locally or remotely, then I would grep lines with numbers wrapped in (: ) then cut those pieces off and write to file

    the accepted answer ignores there could be numbers in the previous lines of the file, it does work for the example data, but what if the file was remote?

    Local

    curl file:///home/$USER/Public/input.txt  | grep -o '(:.*)' | cut -d ":" -f 2 | cut -d ")" -f 1 > output.txt

    In this example output.txt in your current folder will be written over, we are accessing input.txt from your Public folder.

    Remote

    curl https://yoursite.com/Public/input.txt  | grep -o '(:.*)' | cut -d ":" -f 2 | cut -d ")" -f 1 > output.txt

    In this example output.txt in your current folder will be written over, we are accessing input.txt from https://yoursite.com/Public/.

    • 1