ansaurus

Question

Unable to grep a specifiallyFormatted text

Answer 1

+6 A:

man gcc | grep -- "-L"

Notice the argument "--" which means "don't treat anything that follows as an option".

Also, if you took the advice in the error message to run "grep --help" it would have shown you can also explicitly set the pattern with the -e / --regexp option.

man gcc | grep -e "-L"
man gcc | grep --regexp="-L"

Bryan Oakley 2009-06-15 13:26:23

@Bryan: Thank you for your answer! It is confusing that Mac's manual for Grep does not have any documentation about the --. @ Is -- a convention in all Unix commands?

Masi 2009-06-15 16:36:27

It's been a convention for unix commands for many years, but not all commands follow the convention.

Bryan Oakley 2009-06-15 19:29:11

Answer 2

+4 A:

As others have said, grep ( and many other gnu commands ) has a "--" option to tell grep that the remainder of the arguments are not to be treated as options to grep.

However, this will only get you lines that have "-L" on them, and that may not give you context. Are you aware that man has a built-in search capability?

   man gcc
   /-L

Then keep hitting 'n' to see the next match.

Chris Arguin 2009-06-15 13:30:26

I don't think `man` has a built-in search. It's job it to format the man pages for output. Actual display is handles by a pager, typically "more" or on GNU systems "less". The / search is a function of "less"

MSalters 2009-06-15 14:46:43

To give the grep search a context, the options -A, -B and -C might be used.`grep -C 3` will give 3 lines of output context in both directions.

ustun 2009-07-16 12:08:51

-A looks good: man grep | grep -e '-A' -A 5

RamyenHead 2009-12-14 17:04:08

Answer 3

+3 A:

Another possibility:

 man gcc | grep -e "-L"

ustun 2009-06-15 13:33:06

ansaurus

tags:

views:

answers:

Unable to grep a specifiallyFormatted text

related questions