NAME
    pcregrep - a grep with Perl-compatible regular expressions.

SYNOPSIS
    pcregrep [-Vcfhilnrsvx] pattern [file] ...

DESCRIPTION
    pcregrep  searches files for character patterns, in the same way as
    other grep commands do, but it uses the PCRE regular expression library
    to support patterns that are compatible with the regular expressions of
    Perl 5. See pcre(3) for a full description of syntax and semantics.

    If no files are specified, pcregrep reads the standard input. By
    default,  each line that matches the pattern is copied to the standard
    output, and if there is more than one file, the file name is printed
    before each line of output. However, there are options that can change
    how pcregrep behaves.

    Lines are limited to BUFSIZ characters. BUFSIZ is defined in <stdio.h>.
    The newline character is removed from the end of each line before it is
    matched against the pattern.

OPTIONS
    -V  Write the version number of the PCRE library being used to
   the standard error stream.

    -c  Do not print individual lines; instead just print a count of
   the number of lines that would otherwise have been printed.
   If several files are given, a count is printed for each of
   them.

    -ffilename
   Read patterns from the file, one per line, and match all pat-
   terns against each line. There is a maximum of 100 patterns.
   Trailing white space is removed, and blank lines are ignored.
   An empty file contains no patterns and therefore matches
   nothing.

    -h  Suppress printing of filenames when searching multiple files.

    -i  Ignore upper/lower case distinctions during comparisons.

    -l  Instead of printing lines from the files, just print the
   names of the files containing lines that would have been
   printed. Each file name is printed once, on a separate line.

    -n  Precede each line by its line number in the file.

    -r  If any file is a directory, recursively scan the files it
   contains. Without -r a directory is scanned as a normal file.

    -s  Work silently, that is, display nothing except error mes-
   sages.  The exit status indicates whether any matches were
   found.

    -v  Invert the sense of the match, so that  lines which do not
   match the pattern are now the ones that are found.

    -x  Force the pattern to be anchored (it must start matching at
   the beginning of the line) and in addition, require it to
   match the entire line. This is equivalent to having ^ and $
   characters at the start and end of each alternative branch in
   the regular expression.

SEE ALSO
    pcre(3), Perl 5 documentation

DIAGNOSTICS
    Exit status is 0 if any matches were found, 1 if no matches were found,
    and 2 for syntax errors or inacessible files (even if  matches were
    found).

AUTHOR
    Philip Hazel <ph10@cam.ac.uk>

    Last updated: 15 August 2001
    Copyright (c) 1997-2001 University of Cambridge.