How can I select lines containing specific values?
head
and tail
select rows,
cut
selects columns,
and grep
selects lines according to what they contain.
In its simplest form,
grep
takes a piece of text followed by one or more filenames
and prints all of the lines in those files that contain that text.
For example,
grep bicuspid seasonal/winter.csv
prints lines from winter.csv
that contain "bicuspid".
grep
can search for patterns as well;
we will explore those in the next course.
What's more important right now is some of grep
's more common flags:
-c
: print a count of matching lines rather than the lines themselves-h
: do not print the names of files when searching multiple files-i
: ignore case (e.g., treat "Regression" and "regression" as matches)-l
: print the names of files that contain matches, not the matches-n
: print line numbers for matching lines-v
: invert the match, i.e., only show lines that don't match
This exercise is part of the course
Introduction to Shell
Hands-on interactive exercise
Turn theory into action with one of our interactive exercises
