Programming Praxis

Grep is the quintessential unix utility: it has a funny name, has more command-line switches than a Swiss Army knife has blades, and dates to prehistoric times. In its simplest incarnation, grep takes a regular expression and a file and prints those lines of the file that match the regular expression.

Since we wrote a regular-expression matcher in the three previous exercises, it is easy to write our own version of grep. We’ll keep it simple:

grep [-v] regex [file ...]

The -v flag inverts the sense of the match: print only those lines that do not match the regular expression. One or more files may be named on the command line; if so, the filename is printed before each matching (or non-matching, for -v) line. If no filename is given, grep reads from standard input. All output goes to standard output.

Your task is to write grep. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

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