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I know that
grep -rhI "# Active" > out.txt
will output any line containing # Active within the searched directory but I want the entire .txt file contents, so example
example.txt
Line1
Line2
Line3 # Active
Line4
Line5
etc
So if I grep for # Active I want it to not just output the line containing # Active within these .txt file but all the other lines too, example
output.txt
Line1
Line2
Line3 # Active
Line4
Line5
etc
For non-GNU versions of grep, which are unlikely to have -z, or if portability is required...
grep -q pattern file && cat file
-q suppresses any output but, per usual, exit status is set based on whether or not a pattern match was found. With a pattern match grep returns the success code 0 which is equivalent to true and that allows the cat command to be executed.
grep -l "pattern" ./file*s | xargs cat . displays the (concatenated) entirety of all files that have at least 1 line matching "pattern"
Nov 24, 2017 at 12:12
Normally, grep will just show the matching line:
$ grep -rhI "# Active"
Line3 # Active
To see the whole file, add the -z flag:
$ grep -rhIz "# Active"
Line1
Line2
Line3 # Active
Line4
Line5
etc
-z is a GNU extension that tells grep not to use newline as the 'line' separator but to use a NUL character instead. Since text files generally do not have NUL characters in them, this has the effect of telling grep to read the whole file as if it were a single 'line'. Consequently, if there is a match, the whole file is printed.
On BSD/OSX versions of grep, the NUL input option is not available and -z means something else.
-r tells grep to search files and directories recursively.
-I tells grep to ignore binary files
-h tells grep to print the match without the filename attached.
sed alternative:
sed -e 'H;1h;/PATTERN/!d;x;:do' -e 'n;b do' infile
this script works by accumulating lines in the hold buffer (and deleting them) until a matching line is encountered at which point it exchanges the buffers and executes n (i.e. print & get the next line) until there's no more input.
If you want to do it on multiple files:
cat `grep -rIl "# Active" *`
Grep will return the list of filenames and cat will print them.
for loop, use find with -exec, use grep with -Z and pipe it to xargs -0 cat, use zsh with estring qualifier etc...
Nov 24, 2017 at 21:49
shopt -s globstar ; for file in **/*; do test -f "$file" && grep -qlF '# Active' "$file" && cat "$file"; done
Nov 24, 2017 at 21:59