Narrowing a Search Quickly (Unix Power Tools, 3rd Edition)

13.11. Narrowing a Search Quickly

If you're searching a long file to find a particular word or name, or you're running a program like ls -l and you want to filter some lines, here's a quick way to narrow down the search. As an example, say your phone file has 20,000 lines like these:

Smith, Nancy:MFG:50 Park Place:Huntsville:(205)234-5678

and you want to find someone named Nancy. When you see more information, you know you can find which of the Nancys she is:

% grep Nancy phones
...150 lines of names...

Use the C shell's history mechanism (Section 30.2) and sed to cut out lines you don't want. For example, about a third of the Nancys are in Huntsville, and you know she doesn't work there:

% !! | sed -e /Huntsville/d
grep Nancy phones | sed -e /Huntsville/d
...100 lines of names...

The shell shows the command it's executing: the previous command (!!) piped to sed, which deletes lines in the grep output that have the word Huntsville.

Okay. You know Nancy doesn't work in the MFG or SLS groups, so delete those lines, too:

% !! -e /MFG/d -e /SLS/d
grep Nancy phones | sed -e /Huntsville/d -e /MFG/d -e /SLS/d
...20 lines of names...

Keep using !! to repeat the previous command line, and keep adding more sed expressions until the list gets short enough. The same thing works for other commands. When you're hunting for errors in a BSDish system log, for example, and you want to skip lines from named and sudo, use the following:

% cat /var/log/messages | sed -e /named/d -e /sudo/d
...

If the matching pattern has anything but letters and numbers in it, you'll have to understand shell quoting (Section 27.12) and sed regular expressions. Most times, though, this quick-and-dirty method works just fine.

[Yes, you can do the exact same thing with multiple grep -v (Section 13.3) commands, but using sed like this allows multiple matches with only one execution of sed. grep -v requires a new grep process for each condition. -- DH]

-- JP