I wrote down some useful grep command line flags on a post-it like note which I keep loosing. Unlike my earlier post for grep, this one will list everything I found as potential command flags including some not so useful stuff. So, in short, not sure how useful this post will be but it will be useful to me and that is all that counts.
The | character splits up the command and the description.
-i | no-cap-match (slow)
-c | count lines only
–color C = auto, never, always (?)
-m # | (display #, each time resume from last) (not working)
-n | show line number
-A, B # | (# before, after match print)
-C # | (# surrounding)
\ = escape?
-r | read recursively down
-E | extended reged
-F | fixed strings (use this one!)
-G | basic regex
-i Case-insensitive
–color Used for highlighting the part of the line that matches. Set to auto by default on some distros
Slashes escape for regex mode. \\\. matches a literal period, instead of . which matches any single char.
I typically use `grep -ri *stuff* .`
Also if you are working with a git-controlled codebase `git grep` implies -r and ignores the .git folder.