Find the line number where a specific word appears with "grep"

Question

Is grep capable of providing the line number on which the specified word appears?

Also, is possible to use grep to search for a word starting from some certain line downward?

I believe this would be a better fit for [SuperUser](http://superuser.com/). — , May 15 '12 at 00:28
@dunsmoreb I disagree. `grep` is as much a programmer's tool as a power users tool. — Tim Pote, May 15 '12 at 00:50
I use `grep` all the time. But this really isn't a programming-related question. — , May 15 '12 at 00:58
well I found this question helpful whilst writing a bash script that uses grep — camelccc, Oct 05 '13 at 17:35

Tim Pote · Accepted Answer · 2012-05-15T03:15:42.367

61

Use grep -n to get the line number of a match.

I don't think there's a way to get grep to start on a certain line number. For that, use sed. For example, to start at line 10 and print the line number and line for matching lines, use:

sed -n '10,$ { /regex/ { =; p; } }' file

To get only the line numbers, you could use

grep -n 'regex' | sed 's/^\([0-9]\+\):.*$/\1/'

Or you could simply use sed:

sed -n '/regex/=' file

Combining the two sed commands, you get:

sed -n '10,$ { /regex/= }' file

edited May 15 '12 at 03:15

answered May 14 '12 at 19:38

Tim Pote

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Ok, so grep -n would return the line that contains the words AND the line number. Is there anyway to get the line number ONLY ? – One Two Three May 14 '12 at 19:56
@OneTwoThree Did that work for you? – Tim Pote May 14 '12 at 23:30
Tiny correction, missing semi-colon in last example: `sed -n '10,$ { /regex/=;}' file` but otherwise thanks very much, found this useful. – atomicules Jan 18 '14 at 23:35
Does this return only the first match? As in , if there are multiple words matching the regex, then? – ALBI May 28 '15 at 21:17
To get only the `grep -n` line number, it's easier with `cut` : `grep -n text file | cut -d":" -f1` – trogne Nov 30 '16 at 15:50

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered May 14 '12 at 20:00

You can call tail +[line number] [file] and pipe it to grep -n which shows the line number:

tail +[line number] [file] | grep -n /regex/

The only problem with this method is the line numbers reported by grep -n will be [line number] - 1 less than the actual line number in [file].

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered May 15 '12 at 00:23

Or You can use

   grep -n . file1 |tail -LineNumberToStartWith|grep regEx

This will take care of numbering the lines in the file

   grep -n . file1

This will print the last-LineNumberToStartWith

   tail -LineNumberToStartWith

And finally it will grep your desired lines(which will include line number as in orignal file)

grep regEX

Find the line number where a specific word appears with "grep"

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