Display Exact Matches Only with Grep

You need a more specific expression. Try grep " OK$" or grep "[0-9]* OK". You want to choose a pattern that matches what you want, but won't match what you don't want. That pattern will depend upon what your whole file contents might look like.

You can also do: grep -w "OK" which will only match a whole word "OK", such as "1 OK" but won't match "1OK" or "OKFINE".

$ cat test.txt | grep -w "OK"
1 OK
2 OK
4 OK

This may work for you

grep -E '(^|\s)OK($|\s)'

You can use the -v switch to exclude strings.

This will grab any line ending in OK and then remove any line that includes NOT:

(If OK doesn't appear at the end, just remove the $.)

cat test.txt | grep 'OK$' | grep -v 'NOT'

This worked for me:

grep  "\bsearch_word\b"  text_file > output.txt  ## \b indicates boundaries. This is much faster.

or,

grep -w "search_word" text_file > output.txt

Try this:

Alex Misuno@hp4530s ~
$ cat test.txt
1 OK
2 OK
3 NOTOK
4 OK
5 NOTOK
Alex Misuno@hp4530s ~
$ cat test.txt | grep ".* OK$"
1 OK
2 OK
4 OK

Try the below command, because it works perfectly:

grep -ow "yourstring"

crosscheck:-

Remove the instance of word from file, then re-execute this command and it should display empty result.

try this:

grep -P '^(tomcat!?)' tst1.txt

It will search for specific word in txt file. Here we are trying to search word tomcat

Recently I came across an issue in grep. I was trying to match the pattern x.y.z and grep returned x.y-z.Using some regular expression we may can overcome this, but with grep whole word matching did not help. Since the script I was writing is a generic one, I cannot restrict search for a specific way as in like x.y.z or x.y-z ..

Quick way I figured is to run a grep and then a condition check var="x.y.z" var1=grep -o x.y.z file.txt if [ $var1 == $var ] echo "Pattern match exact" else echo "Pattern does not match exact" fi