Can grep show only words that match search pattern?

Question

Is there a way to make grep output \"words\" from files that match the search expression?

If I want to find all the instances of, say, \"th\" in a number of files, I

Answer 1

cat *-text-file | grep -Eio "th[a-z]+"

Answer 2

grep command for only matching and perl

grep -o -P 'th.*? ' filename

Answer 3

You can also try pcregrep. There is also a -w option in grep, but in some cases it doesn't work as expected.

From Wikipedia:

cat fruitlist.txt
apple
apples
pineapple
apple-
apple-fruit
fruit-apple

grep -w apple fruitlist.txt
apple
apple-
apple-fruit
fruit-apple

Answer 4

It's more simple than you think. Try this:

egrep -wo 'th.[a-z]*' filename.txt #### (Case Sensitive)

egrep -iwo 'th.[a-z]*' filename.txt  ### (Case Insensitive)

Where,

 egrep: Grep will work with extended regular expression.
 w    : Matches only word/words instead of substring.
 o    : Display only matched pattern instead of whole line.
 i    : If u want to ignore case sensitivity.

Answer 5

I had a similar problem, looking for grep/pattern regex and the "matched pattern found" as output.

At the end I used egrep (same regex on grep -e or -G didn't give me the same result of egrep) with the option -o

so, I think that could be something similar to (I'm NOT a regex Master) :

egrep -o "the*|this{1}|thoroughly{1}" filename

Answer 6

ripgrep

Here are the example using ripgrep:

rg -o "(\w+)?th(\w+)?"

It'll match all words matching th.