exercism/bash/grep/README.md

Grep

Search a file for lines matching a regular expression pattern. Return the line number and contents of each matching line.

The Unix grep command can be used to search for lines in one or more files that match a user-provided search query (known as the pattern).

The grep command takes three arguments:

1. The pattern used to match lines in a file.
2. Zero or more flags to customize the matching behavior.
3. One or more files in which to search for matching lines.

Your task is to implement the grep function, which should read the contents of the specified files, find the lines that match the specified pattern and then output those lines as a single string. Note that the lines should be output in the order in which they were found, with the first matching line in the first file being output first.

As an example, suppose there is a file named "input.txt" with the following contents:

hello
world
hello again

If we were to call grep "hello" input.txt, the returned string should be:

hello
hello again

Flags

As said earlier, the grep command should also support the following flags:

• -n Print the line numbers of each matching line.
• -l Print only the names of files that contain at least one matching line.
• -i Match line using a case-insensitive comparison.
• -v Invert the program -- collect all lines that fail to match the pattern.
• -x Only match entire lines, instead of lines that contain a match.

If we run grep -n "hello" input.txt, the -n flag will require the matching lines to be prefixed with its line number:

1:hello
3:hello again

And if we run grep -i "HELLO" input.txt, we'll do a case-insensitive match, and the output will be:

hello
hello again

The grep command should support multiple flags at once.

For example, running grep -l -v "hello" file1.txt file2.txt should print the names of files that do not contain the string "hello".

Run the tests with:

bats grep_test.sh

After the first test(s) pass, continue by commenting out or removing the [[ $BATS_RUN_SKIPPED == true ]] || skip annotations prepending other tests.

To run all tests, including the ones with skip annotations, run:

BATS_RUN_SKIPPED=true bats grep_test.sh

Source

Conversation with Nate Foster. http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Courses/cs3110/2014sp/hw/0/ps0.pdf

External utilities

Bash is a language to write "scripts" -- programs that can call external tools, such as sed, awk, date and even programs written in other programming languages, like Python. This track does not restrict the usage of these utilities, and as long as your solution is portable between systems and does not require installation of third party applications, feel free to use them to solve the exercise.

For an extra challenge, if you would like to have a better understanding of the language, try to re-implement the solution in pure Bash, without using any external tools. Note that there are some types of problems that bash cannot solve, such as performing floating point arithmetic and manipulating dates: for those, you must call out to an external tool.

Submitting Incomplete Solutions

It's possible to submit an incomplete solution so you can see how others have completed the exercise.