

The option ‘v’ will print all the lines of the file which do not contain

The command gave me 2 lines before and after the sentence it found the word ‘Lamborghini’. The 458 italia is my favorite car of themHowever I think, For the rest of the article, I will be following the sample file cars.txt with the following content:Ĥ: ferrari SP3 monza is their latest halo carĩ : Test words: FeRrArI, feRRari, ferrARIġ0: The 458 italia is my favorite car of themġ5: Some of their cars also have scissor doors Let us look into the options of grep command in detail.īefore I go any further, let us take a standard text file to work on. We can also combine 2 or more options to combine their functionalities and narrow down the output to exactly how we want it. It prints the other outputs also (not only the 3rd output) because the word “ferrari” is in them too.īut what if we want to search only ‘ferrari’ or maybe even the line numbers it occurs in, or some context after and before the sentence the word is in? Well, that is why grep comes with a lot of predefined options to help us get a more accurate output. The grep command used above searches for the word ‘ferrari’ in the file ‘cars.txt’ and prints all the sentences in which it finds the word “ferrari”. After entering the command, press n to search forwards or N to search backwards.Ferrari is a sports car manufacture ferrari SP3 monza is their latest halo car The e flag means no error is reported if the pattern is not found in the current line, and n means the pattern is counten with no change occurring. For example, assuming the path being searched for does not contain a comma, the following command could be entered: The :substitute command accepts any punctuation character to delimit the search pattern, not just /. Substituting with alternative delimiters :let search register to value from yank register ( for next occurrence. If the path has been copied into the default yank register, use this: :let search register to value from clipboard ( for next occurrence. If you have copied a path like /abc/def/ghi/ into the clipboard, you can search for that text with these commands: Search for next occurrence (will find the exact text entered).Ĭommand! -nargs=1 SS let = '\V'.escape(, '\')|set hlsearchĬommand! -nargs=1 SS let = '\V'.escape(, '/\')|normal! //įor example, with the last alternative, the command :SS ^abc/def\ would find text ^abc/def\ (the same text that was entered). Set search register to '\V^abc/def\\x*y'. To define a new command SS which allows easy searching for text which includes characters that normally have a special meaning in a search pattern. Searching for all characters as normal text Ĭommand! -nargs=1 SS let = '\V'.escape(, '\') Since the command performs an actual search, the pattern is placed in the search history. The escape() function is required to prefix any slashes with a backslash because the text is used in a / command (where a search pattern is terminated by an unescaped slash). In the last example, / represents Ctrl-R then / which enters the value of the search register into the search command (the first /).

This alternative sets the search register and searches for that text:Ĭommand! -nargs=1 Ss let = escape(, '/')|normal! // This alternative sets the search register and enables search highlighting so hits are immediately visible:Ĭommand! -nargs=1 Ss let = |set hlsearch Search for next occurrence of text in search register. Set search register ( to '/abc/def/ghi/'. To define a new command Ss which allows easy searching for text which includes slashes. Other special characters have their usual meaning (for example, the pattern ^abc finds abc, but only at the start of a line). The following alternative commands allow searching for text which includes a slash, with no need to escape each slash in the command. Now, pressing n will search forwards for the next occurrence, and N will search backwards. Or, you can search forwards with / and no pattern, which will use the previous pattern: After searching backwards, you can press n to continue searching in the same direction (backwards), or N to search in the reverse direction (forwards). If searching backwards with " ?", any slashes in the pattern need not be escaped. 5 Substituting with alternative delimiters.3 Searching for all characters as normal text.
