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Is there a way to output the neighbouring lines along with the line numbers while grepping the contents of a file? I'm trying to get outputs of the form:

$ ~/myscript.sh download file # 'download' being the pattern here 121: # and downloads with wget/curl, whichever is available. 122: download_file () { 123: if which wget &>/dev/null; then ---------- 356: # Since the prerequisites are already installed, we may proceed 357: download_urls=("http://example.com/foo/bar.bz2" 358: "http://d1.example.com/xyz/abc.tar.gz"

Of course, I know that I can get grep my pattern with the -n option and show some of the neighbouring lines from the obtained line number (say, by using any of the methods here), but is there a better way to do this?

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You can use GNU grep's Context Line Control, from man grep:

-A NUM, --after-context=NUM
Print NUM lines of trailing context after matching lines. Places a line containing a group separator (--) between contiguous groups of matches. With the -o or --only-matching option, this has no effect and a warning is given.


-B NUM, --before-context=NUM
Print NUM lines of leading context before matching lines. Places a line containing a group separator (--) between contiguous groups of matches. With the -o or --only-matching option, this has no effect and a warning is given.

If you require an equal number of lines either side, you can use a single context number:

-C NUM, -NUM, --context=NUM
Print NUM lines of output context. Places a line containing a group separator (--) between contiguous groups of matches. With the -o or --only-matching option, this has no effect and a warning is given.

When combined with the -n flag (--line-number), you have numbered matches with surrounding context.

In your example:

grep -n -C1 download
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