Question about a unix command...

wazzag · #1 (**permalink**) 08-18-2003

hi all,

got a question about grep, ive written a script (Bourne) and i'm using grep -i to search for a file and return the records that i'm looking for. This all works fine, but, i was wondering how i can get an error message if that word isn't in the file.
E.G.
the user enters: tree
and if tree wasn't in the file it would say:
tree not found

cheers, waz.

google · #2 (**permalink**) 08-18-2003

On the command line, type the following: man grep That should be all you need to know! On the otherhand, in case that doesnt help, try grep -ic pattern files | grep :0 One thing to note, if none of your files contain the pattern, grep will not return anything.

oombera · #3 (**permalink**) 08-18-2003

You can also learn this from the man page, but you can do a test to see if the grep command was successful or not by using $?

Code:

grep -qi pattern your_files ; if [ $? -eq 1 ]; then echo "not found"; fi

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