from the desk of stinkpot

use an OR in grep

April 26th, 2007 by Lawrence David

to search for either of two arguments in grep, you’ll need the usual or character: vertical bar “|”. however, you’ll also need to add a backwards slash in front:

$ grep “str1\|str2″ my_file.txt

Posted in Unix | 4 Comments »

if that was helpful ...

check out the other tips and tricks i've compiled on these pages. you might learn something else interesting!

4 Responses to “use an OR in grep”

1. on 01 Mar 2008 at 7:11 am   Jadu Saikia

   Your whole website is a great work, its very nice

   I have added two similar solutions:

   $ awk ‘/str1|str2/’ file.out
   $ sed -e ‘/str1/b’ -e ‘/str2/b’ -e d file.out

   //Jadu
   http://unstableme.blogspot.com

2. on 01 Mar 2008 at 11:12 am   Lawrence David

   thanks for the ideas jadu!

3. on 25 Mar 2008 at 5:27 pm   niko

   What about egrep ?

   $ egrep “str1|str2″ my_file.txt

4. on 14 Dec 2011 at 8:01 am   Googie

   Thanks for the tip, it was just what I was looking for!
   (checking out the rest of your site now)