The ABC's of grep - B

B

Use the -B flag to show the lines before the matching search term is found.

Remember our file test.txt with the following content:

sad
happy
awake
coffee
work
school

As before, we would search for the word “happy” like this:

$ grep "happy" test.txt
happy

To see the first line before happy, execute the following:

$ grep -B 1 "happy" test.txt
sad
happy

Want to see this in action? Check out the video below.