The ABC's of grep - S

S

Use the -s flag for suppressing​ error messages about unreadable file or files that don’t exist.

Consider a test.txt file with the following content:

sad
happy
awake
coffee
work
school

Searching for “happy” with the -s flag doesn’t really do anything special since test.txt does in fact exist.

$ grep -s "happy" test.txt
happy

Suppose there was a typo and we typed best.txt instead, we would see an error:

$ grep "happy" best.txt
grep: best.txt: No such file or directory

The -s flag will suppress that error:

$ grep -s "happy" best.txt