Monday·14·November·2011
grep everything //at 09:43 //by abe
During the OpenRheinRuhr I noticed that a friend of mine didn’t know
about zgrep and friends. So I told him what other grep
variations I know and he told me about some grep variations I didn’t
know about.
So here’s our collection of grep wrappers, derivatives and variations. First I’ll list programs which search for text in different file formats:
| grep through what | Fixed Strings | Wildcards / Basic RegExps | Extended RegExps | Debian package |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| uncompressed text files | fgrep | grep | egrep | grep |
| gzip-compressed text files | zfgrep | zgrep | zegrep | zutils, gzip |
| bzip2-compressed text files | bzfgrep | bzgrep | bzegrep | bzip2 |
| xz-compressed text files | xzfgrep | xzgrep | xzegrep | xz-utils |
| uncompressed text files in installed Debian packages | dfgrep | dgrep | degrep | debian-goodies |
| gzip-compressed text files in installed Debian packages | - | dzgrep | - | debian-goodies |
| PDF documents | - | - | pdfgrep | pdfgrep |
| POD texts | podgrep | - | - | pmtools |
| E-Mail folder (mbox, MH, Maildir) | - | mboxgrep -G | mboxgrep -E | mboxgrep |
| Patches | - | grepdiff | grepdiff -E | patchutils |
| Process list | - | - | pgrep | procps |
| Gnumeric spreadsheets | ssgrep -F | ssgrep | ? | gnumeric |
| Files in ZIP archives | - | - | zipgrep | unzip |
| ID3 tags in MP3s | - | - | taggrepper | taggrepper |
| Network packets | - | - | ngrep | ngrep |
| Tar archives | - | - | targrep / ptargrep | perl (Experimental only for now) |
And then there are also greps for special patterns on more or less normal files:
| grep for what | uncompressed files | compressed files | Debian package |
|---|---|---|---|
| PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expression) | pcregrep (see also the grep -P option) | zpcregrep | pcregrep |
| IP Address in a given CIDR range | grepcidr | - | grepcidr |
| XPath expression | xml_grep | - | xml-twig-tools |
One question is though still unanswered for us: Is there some kind of meta-grep which chooses per file the right grep from above by looking at the MIME type of the according files, similar to xdg-open.
Other tools which have grep in their name, but are too special to properly fit into the above lists:
- ext3grep: Tool to help recover deleted files on ext3 filesystems
- xautomation: Includes a tool named
visgrepto grep for subimages inside other images.
Includes contributions by Frank Hofmann and Faidon Liambotis.
Tagged as: .deb, bzip2, CIDR, compression, Debian, debian-goodies, E-Mail, efho, ext3grep, Gnumeric, grep, grepcidr, gzip, ID3, list, Maildir, mbox, mboxgrep, mh, MP3, ngrep, packages, patches, PCRE, PDF, pdfgrep, Perl, pmtools, POD, podgrep, procps, taggrepper, TWIG, unzip, visgrep, xautomation, XDG, XML, xz, xz-utils, zip, zutils
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