Use grep to report back only line numbers

grep
Neil picture Neil · Aug 5, 2011 · Viewed 100.3k times · Source

I have a file that possibly contains bad formatting (in this case, the occurrence of the pattern \\backslash). I would like to use grep to return only the line numbers where this occurs (as in, the match was here, go to line # x and fix it).

However, there doesn't seem to be a way to print the line number (grep -n) and not the match or line itself.

I can use another regex to extract the line numbers, but I want to make sure grep cannot do it by itself. grep -no comes closest, I think, but still displays the match.

Answer

love_me_some_linux picture love_me_some_linux · Aug 5, 2011

try:

grep -n "text to find" file.ext | cut -f1 -d:

Related questions

How do I find all files containing specific text on Linux?

I'm trying to find a way to scan my entire Linux system for all files containing a specific string of text. Just to clarify, I'm looking for text within the file, not in the file name. When I was looking …

Read More
How do I grep recursively?

How do I recursively grep all directories and subdirectories? find . | xargs grep "texthere" *

Read More
grep a file, but show several surrounding lines?

I would like to grep for a string, but also show the preceding five lines and the following five lines as well as the matched line. How would I be able to do this?

Read More