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diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..14e5546 --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,55 @@ +# Grab — A better grep + +Grab is a more powerful version of the well-known Grep utility, making +use of structural regular expressions as described by Rob Pike in [this +paper][1]. Grab allows you to be far more precise with your searching +than Grep, as it doesn’t constrain itself to working only on individual +lines. + +Grab invokations must include a pattern string which specifies which text +to match. A pattern string consists of one or more commands. A command +is an operator followed by a delimiter, a regular expression (regex), and +then terminated by the same delimiter. The last delimiter of the last +command is optional. + +For example, a pattern string may look like ‘`x/[a-z]+/ g.foo. v/bar/`’. + +The available operators are ‘g’, ‘v’, and ‘x’. The ‘x' operator iterates +over all matches of the corresponding regex. This means that to print +all numbers in a file, you can use the pattern string ‘`x/[0-9]+/`’. The +‘g’ and ‘v’ operators are filters. The ‘g’ operator discards all results +that don’t match the given regex, while the ‘v’ operator discards all +results that *do* match the given regex. This means that to select all +numbers in a file that contain a ‘3’ but are not ‘1337’, you can use the +pattern string ‘`x/[0-9]+/ g/3/ v/^1337$/`’. + + +## Examples + +Get a list of your CPU flags. + +```sh +# With Grep +grep '^flags' /proc/cpuinfo \ +| sed 's/flags:\t*: //; y/ /\n/' \ +| sort \ +| uniq + +# With Grab +grab 'x/^flags.*/ x/\w+/ v/flags/' /proc/cpuinfo \ +| sort \ +| uniq +``` + +1) Select lines that start with ‘flags’: `x/^flags.*/` +2) Select all the words: `x/\w+/` +3) Filter out the word ‘flags’: `v/flags/` + + +## Additional Options + +The Grab utility has a few options that may be helpful for your usecase. +For more detailed documentation, see the Grab manual with `man grab`. + + +[1]: https://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/structural_regexps/se.pdf |