Minimal Perl

Chapter 3. Perl as a (better) grep command

3.1	A brief history of grep	53
3.2	Shortcomings of grep	54
3.3	Working with the matching operator	60
3.4	Understanding Perl’s regex notation	63
3.5	Perl as a better fgrep	64
3.6	Displaying the match only, using $&	64
3.7	Displaying unmatched records (like grep -v)	65
3.8	Displaying filenames only (like grep -l)	67
3.9	Using matching modifiers	68
3.10	Perl as a better egrep	70
3.11	Matching in context	75
3.12	Spanning lines with regexes	77
3.13	Additional examples	81
3.14	Summary	86

This chapter shows you how to write one-line Perl commands and small Perl scripts that surpass the limitations of the UNIX grep command. We’ll start by reviewing grep’s history, strengths, and weaknesses, and Perl’s superior features, and then we’ll show how Perl programs ...