How to grep return result as the matching term

Question

I would like to return only the first instance (case-insensitive) of the term I used to search (if there's a match), how would I do this?

example:

$ grep "exactly-this"

Binary file /Path/To/Some/Files/file.txt matches

I would like to return the result like:

$ grep "exactly-this"

exactly-this

rjv · Answer 1 · 2013-06-08T17:40:03.877

0

grep has an inbuilt count argument

You can use the -m option to give a count argument to grep

grep -m 1 "exactly-this"

If you want to avoid the message in case of the binary files,use

grep -a -m 1 "exactly-this"

Note that this will print the word in which the match occurred.Since it is a binary file,the word may span over multiple lines

edited Jun 08 '13 at 17:40

answered Jun 08 '13 at 17:15

rjv

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It doesn't output `exactly-this`. – T. Rex Jun 08 '13 at 17:27
you mean you want to know how to match the exact string too? – rjv Jun 08 '13 at 17:30

jaypal singh · Answer 2 · 2013-06-09T05:07:42.207

What you need is the -o option of grep.

From the man page

 -o, --only-matching
             Prints only the matching part of the lines.

Test:

[jaypal:~/Temp] cat file
This is a file with some exactly this in the middle
with exactly this in the begining
and some at the very end in brackets (exactly this)

[jaypal:~/Temp] grep -o 'exactly this' file
exactly this
exactly this
exactly this

[jaypal:~/Temp] grep -om1 'exactly this' file
exactly this

How to grep return result as the matching term

2 Answers2

Test: