GNU bug report logs - #24382
grep should support -l and -n together

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Message #5 received at submit <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Mathieu Jobin <somekool <at> gmail.com>
To: bug-grep <at> gnu.org
Subject: grep should support -l and -n together
Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2016 10:36:22 -0400

[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]

I like using

> grep -rn pattern dir

a lot because it returns all the result with the line numbers
I think its one of the most common use case of grep.

recently I started using

> grep -rl pattern dir

only returning the list of files, without the content appended.
I find that really useful

but when using -rl , -n is ignored, which is sad, because I could pipe in
my editor and it would open the files at the proper line

for example

> grep -rln "[^a-z]if .\+ = .\+" app  | xargs kate

unfortunately, the line numbers is not present on the grep output here


should you chose not to support this, then it should probably error out

cheers,


-- 
Mathieu Jobin

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Message #8 received at submit <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
To: bug-grep <at> gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#24382: grep should support -l and -n together
Date: Tue, 6 Sep 2016 09:57:11 -0700

On 09/06/2016 07:36 AM, Mathieu Jobin wrote:
> should you chose not to support this, then it should probably error out

Hmm, well, as I understand it POSIX requires that -n be ignored if -l is 
also specified; see:

http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/grep.html

I suppose we could add an option saying "please output file names and 
line numbers but not line contents". This option would act like -o, 
except it would omit all the line contents instead of just the 
non-matching part. Seems like a bit of a specialized use, though.

Can't you get something close to what you want, by asking the editor to 
search for the matching lines? For vi, you can do the following, and I 
assume your editor has a similar option:

vi +/PATTERN $(grep -l PATTERN FILES)

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