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When I grep the man page of the find command for matches to type it returns a lot of search results that I don't want. Instead I want to use a command that returns only the search results for -type.
The command man find | grep -type doesn't work. It returns:
grep: invalid option -- 't'
If you want to grep for a pattern beginning with a hyphen, use -- before the pattern you specify.
man find | grep -- -type
If you want more info, for example the entire section describing an option, you could try using Sed:
$ man find | sed -n '/-mindepth/,/^$/p'
-mindepth levels
Do not apply any tests or actions at levels less than levels (a
non-negative integer). -mindepth 1 means process all files
except the command line arguments.
However, this won't work for every option you might search for. For example:
$ man find | sed -n '/^[[:space:]]*-type/,/^$/p'
-type c
File is of type c:
Not very helpful. Worse, for some options you could be misled into thinking you'd read the whole text about the option when you really hadn't. For example, searching -delete omits the very important WARNING contained as a second paragraph under that heading.
My recommendation is to use a standard call to man with the LESS environment variable set. I use it quite commonly in my answers on this site.
LESS='+/^[[:space:]]*-type' man find
To learn more about how this works, see:
LESS='+/^[[:space:]]*LESS ' man less
LESS='+/\+cmd' man less
LESS='+/\/' man less
If you just want to find the option quickly and interactively in the man page, learn to use less's search capabilities. And also see:
man find | sed -n '/-type/,/^$/p' gives lot more than what you posted as it will match -type anywhere in the line... am working on small script myself to search man or help (for builtin) and currently using awk which still has few quirks to solve.. awk -v RS= -v rx="^\\\s*$arg\\\>" '$0 ~ rx' "$file" where arg would be -type in this case
troff files containing the original man page info with format information, instead of the text output of the man command.
troff. Ping me in chat when you finish diving down the rabbit hole. :)
Or pipe to less and feed that a search term:
man 1 find | less -p ' -type'
(This may fail depending on exactly what less is feed, e.g. if -type has been bolded up with backspaces.)
-type, or do you want, say, the entire paragraph or two that describes what-typedoes?-typewould be enough for the way I usually search the man pages, however returning the entire paragraph or two that describes what-typedoes would be very useful to do at least one time.-typeoption does.