PCREGREP(1)						      General Commands Manual						       PCREGREP(1)

NAME

       pcregrep - a grep with Perl-compatible regular expressions.

SYNOPSIS

       pcregrep [-Vcfhilnrsvx] pattern [file] ...

DESCRIPTION

       pcregrep  searches files for character patterns, in the same way as other grep commands do, but it uses the PCRE regular expression library
       to support patterns that are compatible with the regular expressions of Perl 5. See pcre(3) for a full description of syntax and semantics.

       If no files are specified, pcregrep reads the standard input. By default, each line that matches the pattern is copied to the standard out-
       put,  and  if  there is more than one file, the file name is printed before each line of output. However, there are options that can change
       how pcregrep behaves.

       Lines are limited to BUFSIZ characters. BUFSIZ is defined in <stdio.h>.	The newline character is removed from the end of each line  before
       it is matched against the pattern.

OPTIONS

       -V	 Write the version number of the PCRE library being used to the standard error stream.

       -c	 Do  not print individual lines; instead just print a count of the number of lines that would otherwise have been printed. If sev-
		 eral files are given, a count is printed for each of them.

       -ffilename
		 Read patterns from the file, one per line, and match all patterns against each line. There is a maximum of 100 patterns. Trailing
		 white space is removed, and blank lines are ignored. An empty file contains no patterns and therefore matches nothing.

       -h	 Suppress printing of filenames when searching multiple files.

       -i	 Ignore upper/lower case distinctions during comparisons.

       -l	 Instead  of  printing lines from the files, just print the names of the files containing lines that would have been printed. Each
		 file name is printed once, on a separate line.

       -n	 Precede each line by its line number in the file.

       -r	 If any file is a directory, recursively scan the files it contains. Without -r a directory is scanned as a normal file.

       -s	 Work silently, that is, display nothing except error messages.  The exit status indicates whether any matches were found.

       -v	 Invert the sense of the match, so that lines which do not match the pattern are now the ones that are found.

       -x	 Force the pattern to be anchored (it must start matching at the beginning of the line) and in addition, require it to	match  the
		 entire  line.	This  is  equivalent  to  having ^ and $ characters at the start and end of each alternative branch in the regular
		 expression.

SEE ALSO

       pcre(3), Perl 5 documentation

DIAGNOSTICS

       Exit status is 0 if any matches were found, 1 if no matches were found, and 2 for syntax errors or inacessible files (even if matches  were
       found).

AUTHOR

       Philip Hazel <ph10@cam.ac.uk>

       Last updated: 15 August 2001
       Copyright (c) 1997-2001 University of Cambridge.

																       PCREGREP(1)