Shell – Grep complete name including dot in the word

grepshell-scripttext processing

In a ksh shell script I am using a grep command to get a specific word as shown below.

$ cat file.txt
abc xyzdef.123 def.jkl mnopqrst

$ grep -o "\wdef\w" file.txt
xyzdef
def

I want output to be xyzdef.123 and def.jkl

It is not fetching the value after . Is there any other way to grep this word also I don't know the exact word to grep only I know a pattern. I am working on ksh shell.

Best Answer

Looks like you just want the string def and all non-whitespace characters around it. If so, you can use:

$ grep -Eo '\S*def\S*' file.txt 
xyzdef.123
def.jkl

The \S means non-whitespace and is supported by GNU grep with either the -E or -P flags.

Faster Alternative

If your log files are large and you are grepping for fixed words, as opposed to fancy regular expressions, you may want to consider this approach:

inc='hello
animal
atttribute
metadata'

exc='timeout
runner'

ssh office "grep -F '$inc' ptd.log | grep -vF '$exc'"

By putting each word on a separate line, we can use grep's -F feature for fixed strings. This turns off regex processing, making the process faster.

Best Answer

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