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PCREGREP(1)
NAME
  pcregrep - a grep with Perl-compatible regular expressions.

SYNOPSIS
  pcregrep [-Vcfhilnrsuvx] [long options] [pattern] [file1

DESCRIPTION
  pcregrep searches files for character patterns, in the same way as other
  grep commands do, but it uses the PCRE regular expression library to
  support patterns that are compatible with the regular expressions of Perl
  5. See pcrepattern for a full description of syntax and semantics of the
  regular expressions that PCRE supports.

  A pattern must be specified on the command line unless the -f option is
  used (see below).

  If no files are specified, pcregrep reads the standard input. By default,
  each line that matches the pattern is copied to the standard output, and if
  there is more than one file, the file name is printed before each line of
  output. However, there are options that can change how pcregrep behaves.

  Lines are limited to BUFSIZ characters. BUFSIZ is defined in <stdio.h>.
  The newline character is removed from the end of each line before it is
  matched against the pattern.

OPTIONS
  -V	    Write the version number of the PCRE library being used to the
	    standard error stream.

  -c	    Do not print individual lines; instead just print a count of the
	    number of lines that would otherwise have been printed. If
	    several files are given, a count is printed for each of them.

  -ffilename
	    Read a number of patterns from the file, one per line, and match
	    all of them against each line of input. A line is output if any
	    of the patterns match it.  When -f is used, no pattern is taken
	    from the command line; all arguments are treated as file names.
	    There is a maximum of 100 patterns. Trailing white space is
	    removed, and blank lines are ignored. An empty file contains no
	    patterns and therefore matches nothing.

  -h	    Suppress printing of filenames when searching multiple files.

  -i	    Ignore upper/lower case distinctions during comparisons.

  -l	    Instead of printing lines from the files, just print the names of
	    the files containing lines that would have been printed. Each
	    file name is printed once, on a separate line.

  -n	    Precede each line by its line number in the file.

  -r	    If any file is a directory, recursively scan the files it
	    contains. Without -r a directory is scanned as a normal file.

  -s	    Work silently, that is, display nothing except error messages.
	    The exit status indicates whether any matches were found.

  -u	    Operate in UTF-8 mode. This option is available only if PCRE has
	    been compiled with UTF-8 support. Both the pattern and each
	    subject line are assumed to be valid strings of UTF-8 characters.

  -v	    Invert the sense of the match, so that lines which do not match
	    the pattern are now the ones that are found.

  -x	    Force the pattern to be anchored (it must start matching at the
	    beginning of the line) and in addition, require it to match the
	    entire line. This is equivalent to having ^ and $ characters at
	    the start and end of each alternative branch in the regular
	    expression.

LONG OPTIONS
  Long forms of all the options are available, as in GNU grep. They are shown
  in the following table:

    -c	 --count
    -h	 --no-filename
    -i	 --ignore-case
    -l	 --files-with-matches
    -n	 --line-number
    -r	 --recursive
    -s	 --no-messages
    -u	 --utf-8
    -V	 --version
    -v	 --invert-match
    -x	 --line-regex
    -x	 --line-regexp

  In addition, --file=filename is equivalent to -ffilename, and --help shows
  the list of options and then exits.

DIAGNOSTICS
  Exit status is 0 if any matches were found, 1 if no matches were found, and
  2 for syntax errors or inacessible files (even if matches were found).

AUTHOR
  Philip Hazel <ph10@cam.ac.uk>
  University Computing Service
  Cambridge CB2 3QG, England.

Last updated: 03 February 2003
Copyright (c) 1997-2003 University of Cambridge.

Index for Section 1

Alphabetical listing for P

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