I'm in bash and I have a file, I want to find all matches of a regex in it and have them printed. How do I do that?
Followup: Assume I want to print only unique matches, i.e. if a match appears multiple times, it should be printed only once. How do I do that? (I want this answer in addition to the first, so I want an answer to the first question too.)
Try grep -o 'myregex.*stuff' file and for the second question grep -o 'myregex.*stuff' file | sort | uniq.
The -o grep switch will print only the matches instead of printing the whole line that matches the regex.
sort -u instead piping to uniq uniq isn't right, it only handles successive repetitions. Fixed answer. Thank you! sort | uniq in combination instead of sort -u because I might want to extend it to sort | uniq -c | sort -n. Also uniq will be right if you have the output sorted before, like suggested.