4

I am on macOS and would like to get into using grep (or a similar tool) to find unique occurrences of a certain pattern in a codebase. For example, for finding all console.somemethod() calls in JavaScript I have devised:

grep -oiER "console\.([a-z]+)\(" . | sort -u

But this gets me results in the form:

./tools/svg-inject/node_modules/with/node_modules/acorn/src/bin/acorn.js:console.log(
./tools/svg-inject/node_modules/wordwrap/README.markdown:console.log(
./tools/svg-inject/node_modules/wordwrap/example/center.js:console.log(
./tools/svg-inject/node_modules/wordwrap/example/meat.js:console.log(
./tools/svg-inject/node_modules/yargs/README.md:console.dir(
./tools/svg-inject/node_modules/yargs/README.md:console.log(
./tools/svg-inject/node_modules/yargs/index.js:console.log(
./tools/svg-inject/node_modules/yargs/lib/usage.js:console.error(
./tools/svg-inject/node_modules/yargs/lib/usage.js:console.log(
./webpack.config.js:console.info(
Console.sendTo(
console.error(
console.log(
console.markTimeline(
console.reactStackEnd(
console.timeEnd(
console.trace(
console.warn(

I would like to restrict it to unique matches of the ([a-z]+) group only:

info
sendTo
error
log
markTimeline
reactStackEnd
timeEnd
trace
warn

Apologies if I'm rehashing an old question!

Dan Inactive
  • 145

1 Answers1

4

Use the -P option for perl regex with \K directive in the regex that will exclude the preceding string part matching from the result:

grep -ioP "console\.\K[a-z]+" file.txt
log
log
log
log
dir
log
log
error
log
info
sendTo
error
log
markTimeline
reactStackEnd
timeEnd
trace
warn

I have put your example lines in file.txt to test.

To restrict to uniq occurrence:

grep -ioP "console\.\K[a-z]+" file.txt | sort -u
dir
error
info
log
markTimeline
reactStackEnd
sendTo
timeEnd
trace
warn

Another solution -P option has been remove macOS version 10.8

If you have perl installed:

perl -nle 'print $1 if /console\.([a-z]+)/' file.txt | sort -u
dir
error
info
log
mark
react
time
trace
warn

In order to work with all files in the directory:

perl -nle 'print $1 if /console\.([a-z]+)/' * | sort -u
Toto
  • 19,304