The ABC's of grep - X

X

Use the -x​ flag to match on an entire line.

Let’s go back to our test.txt file and add a sentence at the end:

sad
happy
awake
coffee
work
school
I love coffee.

If we wanted to search for “coffee” we would do the following:

$ grep "coffee" test.txt
coffee
I love coffee.

As expected, we get both lines that contain the word “coffee”.

Let’s try again with the -x flag.

$ grep -x "coffee" test.txt
coffee
$ grep -x "I love coffee." test.txt
I love coffee.

As you can see, using the -x flag only matches on the entire line.