How to use grep in a shell script to find a word inside of a file

Question

How can I use grep to find an exact word inside of a file entered by the user as string?

For example I need to select the word I want to find and the file I want to find it in. I've been told I am really close but something is not working as it should be. I'm using bash shell under Linux.

Here's what I've done so far:

#!/bin/bash
echo "Find the file you want to search the word in?"
read filename
echo "Enter the word you want to find."  
read word1
grep $word1 $filename

Solution 1

How can I use grep to find an exact word inside of a file entered by the user as string.

Try using -F option. Type man grep on shell for more details.

grep -F "$word1" "$filename"

It's recommended to enclose search string and file name with quotes to avoid unexpected output because of white spaces.

---

Not sure why you have fi on the last line. It's not needed.

Solution 2

Try:

grep -R WORD ./ to search the entire current directory, or grep WORD ./path/to/file.ext to search inside a specific file.

Solution 3

#!/bin/bash/
echo "Find the file you want to search the word in?"   
read filename  
echo "Enter the word you want to find."   
read word  
cat $filename | grep "$word"

This works fine to find the exact word match in a file.