Here is something to use as a replacement for "grep -q". In the past I found grep -q was not portable. There are times when I do not have grep. But I always

Here is something to use as a replacement for "grep -q". In the past I found grep -q was not portable. There are times when I do not have grep. But I always have sed. cat grepq test $# -ge 1|| exec echo usage: $0 PATTERN \[FILE\] # count lines until PATTERN __=$(exec sed -n '/'"$1"'/!d;=;q' $2); # no of lines exec test ${#__} -gt 0; For example, grepq '93.184.216.34 example.com' /etc/hosts|| echo 93.184.216.34 example.com >> /etc/hosts One of the very early OReilly books has a chapter or two about sed that tries to describe it using an analogy to a scrivener in a monastary. Quite amusing. This is not the "sed and awk" book. It was an earlier book on text editing with UNIX. It may have been co-authored by OReilly himself; I cannot remember.