2 pgrep - a grep with Perl-compatible regular expressions.
7 pgrep [-Vchilnsvx] pattern [file] ...
12 pgrep searches files for character patterns, in the same way
13 as other grep commands do, but it uses the PCRE regular
14 expression library to support patterns that are compatible
15 with the regular expressions of Perl 5. See pcre(3) for a
16 full description of syntax and semantics.
18 If no files are specified, pgrep reads the standard input.
19 By default, each line that matches the pattern is copied to
20 the standard output, and if there is more than one file, the
21 file name is printed before each line of output. However,
22 there are options that can change how pgrep behaves.
24 Lines are limited to BUFSIZ characters. BUFSIZ is defined in
25 <stdio.h>. The newline character is removed from the end of
26 each line before it is matched against the pattern.
31 -V Write the version number of the PCRE library being
32 used to the standard error stream.
34 -c Do not print individual lines; instead just print
35 a count of the number of lines that would other-
36 wise have been printed. If several files are
37 given, a count is printed for each of them.
39 -h Suppress printing of filenames when searching mul-
42 -i Ignore upper/lower case distinctions during com-
45 -l Instead of printing lines from the files, just
46 print the names of the files containing lines that
47 would have been printed. Each file name is printed
48 once, on a separate line.
50 -n Precede each line by its line number in the file.
52 -s Work silently, that is, display nothing except
53 error messages. The exit status indicates whether
54 any matches were found.
56 -v Invert the sense of the match, so that lines which
57 do not match the pattern are now the ones that are
60 -x Force the pattern to be anchored (it must start
61 matching at the beginning of the line) and in
62 addition, require it to match the entire line.
63 This is equivalent to having ^ and $ characters at
64 the start and end of each alternative branch in
65 the regular expression.
70 pcre(3), Perl 5 documentation
77 Exit status is 0 if any matches were found, 1 if no matches
78 were found, and 2 for syntax errors or inacessible files
79 (even if matches were found).
84 Philip Hazel <ph10@cam.ac.uk>
85 Copyright (c) 1997-1999 University of Cambridge.