grep without showing path/file:line

linux unix grep find
Allan Thomas picture Allan Thomas · Oct 16, 2013 · Viewed 183.1k times · Source

How do you grep and only return the matching line? i.e. The path/filename is omitted from the results.

In this case I want to look in all .bar files in the current directory, searching for the term FOO

find . -name '*.bar' -exec grep -Hn FOO {} \;

Answer

fedorqui 'SO stop harming' picture fedorqui 'SO stop harming' · Oct 16, 2013

No need to find. If you are just looking for a pattern within a specific directory, this should suffice:

grep -hn FOO /your/path/*.bar

Where -h is the parameter to hide the filename, as from man grep:

-h, --no-filename

Suppress the prefixing of file names on output. This is the default when there is only one file (or only standard input) to search.

Note that you were using

-H, --with-filename

Print the file name for each match. This is the default when there is more than one file to search.

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