grep a file, but show several surrounding lines?

search logging grep command-line-interface
Mark Harrison picture Mark Harrison · Aug 12, 2008 · Viewed 1.1M times · Source

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?

Answer

Pat Notz picture Pat Notz · Aug 12, 2008

For BSD or GNU grep you can use -B num to set how many lines before the match and -A num for the number of lines after the match.

grep -B 3 -A 2 foo README.txt

If you want the same number of lines before and after you can use -C num.

grep -C 3 foo README.txt

This will show 3 lines before and 3 lines after.

Related questions

How can I exclude one word with grep?

I need something like: grep ^"unwanted_word"XXXXXXXX

Read More
grep, but only certain file extensions

I am working on writing some scripts to grep certain directories, but these directories contain all sorts of file types. I want to grep just .h and .cpp for now, but maybe a few others in the future. So far …

Read More
Use grep --exclude/--include syntax to not grep through certain files

I'm looking for the string foo= in text files in a directory tree. It's on a common Linux machine, I have bash shell: grep -ircl "foo=" * In the directories are also many binary files which match "foo=". As these results …

Read More