Grep – How to Suppress Display of Non-Matched Files

command-switchgrepsearchstdout

I am trying to find files containing a specific word using grep. There are many files in the directory (> 500)

Command I run

$ grep 'delete' *

Output

validate_data_stage1:0
validate_data_stage2:0
validate_data_stage3:0
validate_data_stage4:0
validate_data_stage5:0
validate_input_stage1:0
validate_input_stage2:0
validate_input_stage3:0
validate_input_stage4:0
.... and hundred of such lines

These are the files that don't contain the given match. I want to suppress those lines from displaying to stdout. I know of -q switch, but that would suppress the complete output, which I don't want.

How do I do that?

Best Answer

That's the behavior exhibited by grep -c.

Probably you have a file whose name starts with - and contains a c character and you're using GNU grep without setting the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable.

Use:

grep -- delete *

or better:

grep delete ./*

-- marks the end of options so that that filename will not be considered as an option (with a POSIX grep, it wouldn't since the non-option delete argument would have marked the end of options), but it wouldn't address the problem of a file called -. The grep delete ./* is more robust but has the drawback of outputting the extra ./ for matching files (though that may be considered a bonus since that helps identify file names that contain newline characters).

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