Is there any way to give grep some context? It's great knowing what file a word ...

rntz · on June 5, 2009

from `man grep`:

     -A NUM, --after-context=NUM
            Print  NUM  lines  of  trailing context after matching lines.  Places a
            line containing a group separator (--)  between  contiguous  groups  of
            matches.  With the -o or --only-matching option, this has no effect and
            a warning is given.

     -B NUM, --before-context=NUM
            Print NUM lines of leading context before  matching  lines.   Places  a
            line  containing  a  group  separator (--) between contiguous groups of
            matches.  With the -o or --only-matching option, this has no effect and
            a warning is given.

     -C NUM, -NUM, --context=NUM
            Print  NUM  lines  of output context.  Places a line containing a group
            separator (--) between contiguous groups of matches.  With  the  -o  or
            --only-matching option, this has no effect and a warning is given.

akirk · on June 5, 2009

Not that obvious (even from this description): you can simply do a grep -3 to get three lines of context, etc.

mileszs · on June 5, 2009

I use a function that looks like this:

  find $1 -name $2 | xargs egrep -nC3 $3 | less

So, say:

  find ./ -name "*.rb" | xargs egrep -nC3 'gsub' | less

You'll get the matching line, three lines before and three lines after, as well as file name and line numbers.

mahmud · on June 5, 2009

awk and perl will let you do magic, my friend. Advanced "grep" features are only in GNU grep.