grep is a bash program that searches files for lines containing a match to a given pattern.
Without any special tricks, it's used like this. This will search for the pattern string inside the file file.txt. Each line that matches is displayed entirely.
grep 'string' file.txt
This can take a few flags. The -E flag tells grep to treat the string like a regular expression. The numbers in curly braces mean to take one character before and four characters after the string.
grep -E '.{0,1}string.{0,4}' file.txt
The -o flag prints only the matching part of the line.
grep -oE '.{0,1}string.{0,4}' file.txt
The -n flag prints line numbers.
grep -oEn '.{0,1}string.{0,4}' file.txt
The -m flag suppresses output to the maximum number of occurences. The following command will display only 5 occurences. The -m flag must be the last one in the chain of flags or must stand alone before or after the other flags.
grep -oEnm 5 '.{0,1}string.{0,4}' file.txt
grep -m 5 -oEn '.{0,1}string.{0,4}' file.txt
The -i flag performs a case insensitive search.
grep -m 5 -oEni '.{0,1}string.{0,4}' file.txt
grep can handle multiple files. In this example, the first five occurences in each json file will be displayed.
grep -onE -m 5 ".{0,3}scraped.{0,40}" *.json
Parts of a file, such as the output of tail can be passed to grep to search just
tail -20 file.txt | grep -E '.{0,3}string.{0,40}'
The deeper I get into grep, the less I ever want to use Ctrl-F in a file editor again. Check out Software Carpentry's shell lessons to learn more. I also like this cheat sheet for quick reference.