Sunday, April 28, 2013

Useless Use of Grep

Most of us are familiar with the infamous Useless Use of Cat Award which is awarded for unnecessary use of the cat command. A while back, I also wrote about Useless Use of Echo in which I advised using here-strings and here-docs instead of the echo command. In a similar vein, this post is about the useless use of the grep command.

Useless use of grep | awk
awk can match patterns, so there is no need to pipe the output of grep to awk. For example, the following:

grep pattern file | awk '{commands}'
can be re-written as:
awk '/pattern/{commands}' file
Similarly:
grep -v pattern file | awk '{commands}'
can be re-written as:
awk '!/pattern/{commands}' file

Useless use of grep | sed
sed can match patterns, so you don't need to pipe the output of grep to sed. For example, the following:

grep pattern file | sed 's/foo/bar/g'
can be re-written as:
sed -n '/pattern/{s/foo/bar/p}' file
Similarly:
grep -v pattern file | sed 's/foo/bar/g'
can be re-written as:
sed -n '/pattern/!{s/foo/bar/p}' file

Useless use of grep in conditions
If you find yourself using grep in conditional statements to check if a string variable matches a certain pattern, consider using bash's in-built string matching instead. For example, the following:

if grep -q pattern <<< "$var"; then
    # do something
fi
can be re-written as:
if [[ $var == *pattern* ]]; then
    # do something
fi
or, if your pattern is a regex, rather than a fixed string, use:
if [[ $var =~ pattern ]]; then
    # do something
fi

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