[text] Output grep results to text file, need cleaner output

When using the Grep command to find a search string in a set of files, how do I dump the results to a text file?

Also is there a switch for the Grep command that provides cleaner results for better readability, such as a line feed between each entry or a way to justify file names and search results?

For instance, a away to change...

./file/path: first result
./another/file/path: second result
./a/third/file/path/here: third result

to

./file/path: first result

./another/file/path: second result

./a/third/file/path/here: third result

This question is related to text grep output

The answer is


grep -n "YOUR SEARCH STRING" * > output-file

The -n will print the line number and the > will redirect grep-results to the output-file.
If you want to "clean" the results you can filter them using pipe | for example:
grep -n "test" * | grep -v "mytest" > output-file will match all the lines that have the string "test" except the lines that match the string "mytest" (that's the switch -v) - and will redirect the result to an output file.
A few good grep-tips can be found on this post


Redirection of program output is performed by the shell.

grep ... > output.txt

grep has no mechanism for adding blank lines between each match, but does provide options such as context around the matched line and colorization of the match itself. See the grep(1) man page for details, specifically the -C and --color options.


Examples related to text

Difference between opening a file in binary vs text How do I center text vertically and horizontally in Flutter? How to `wget` a list of URLs in a text file? Convert txt to csv python script Reading local text file into a JavaScript array Python: How to increase/reduce the fontsize of x and y tick labels? How can I insert a line break into a <Text> component in React Native? How to split large text file in windows? Copy text from nano editor to shell Atom menu is missing. How do I re-enable

Examples related to grep

grep's at sign caught as whitespace cat, grep and cut - translated to python How to suppress binary file matching results in grep Linux find and grep command together Filtering JSON array using jQuery grep() Linux Script to check if process is running and act on the result grep without showing path/file:line How do you grep a file and get the next 5 lines How to grep, excluding some patterns? Fast way of finding lines in one file that are not in another?

Examples related to output

How to create multiple output paths in Webpack config Where does the slf4j log file get saved? CMake output/build directory Suppress console output in PowerShell Output grep results to text file, need cleaner output How to use python numpy.savetxt to write strings and float number to an ASCII file? How to read a CSV file from a URL with Python? How can I suppress column header output for a single SQL statement? How to recover closed output window in netbeans? How can I see normal print output created during pytest run?