Limiting grep output

Here's a quick way to limit output of the grep command.

Most of the time, we issue the following to find needle in the haystack:

grep needle file.txt

This prints out the matching pattern. If the output is way too long and we only need a section of it, we can use the extended grep (a.k.a. egrep) option.



Here's how to use regular expressions to instruct grep to only display 40 characters before and after the matching pattern:

grep -Eo '.{0,40}needle.{0,40}' file.txt