4 ms·

Does someone know what's this use of grep as cat he alludes at ?

• fhars 17y ago
  You can use grep '.*' > /etc/password instead of cat > /etc/password
  • jvdh 17y ago
    since echo still worked, why would you need grep for that one?
    • lsb 17y ago
      echo, as he says, was built into the korn shell, whereas grep was a binary he deleted from the filesystem.
    • fhars 17y ago
      Because it does something entirely different. "echo " is the same as "ls", while "grep '.'" is the same as "cat".
• olefoo 17y ago
  Match any non-empty line. /usr/bin/grep ".*" /path/of/file
  • nash 17y ago
    Sod any 'non-empty line' /usr/bin/grep '^' > output Or even better, grep can be an editor with line filtering - if you make an mistake, have it throw away the line: /usr/bin/grep -v '%' > output (Any line with a %, throw away, keep the rest - good for multi-line files)
  • JoachimSchipper 17y ago
    That command actually matches any line. You seem to have confused it with egrep ".+".
• rdtsc 17y ago
  Perhaps using grep to match anything and thus output the whole file? grep '.*' file