How to Suppress Output from grep and Only Return Exit Status

GNU grep has the -P option for perl-style regexes, and the -o option to print only what matches the pattern. These can be combined using look-around assertions (described under Extended Patterns in the perlre manpage) to remove part of the grep pattern from what is determined to have matched for the purposes of -o.

$ grep -oP 'foobar \K\w+' test.txt
bash
happy
$

The \K is the short-form (and more efficient form) of (?<=pattern) which you use as a zero-width look-behind assertion before the text you want to output. (?=pattern) can be used as a zero-width look-ahead assertion after the text you want to output.

For instance, if you wanted to match the word between foo and bar, you could use:

$ grep -oP 'foo \K\w+(?= bar)' test.txt

or (for symmetry)

$ grep -oP '(?<=foo )\w+(?= bar)' test.txt

In bash

while read -r word
do
    grep -q "$word" file.before
    if [ $? -ne "0" ]
    then
        echo "$word not in file"
     fi
done < <(cut -f1 -d" " file.after)

The -q to grep tells it to be quiet, you can then interrogate $? to see if there was a match 0 or not 1.