grep: Introduction

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1 1 Introduction
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1 ‘grep’ searches input files for lines containing a match to a given
1 pattern list.  When it finds a match in a line, it copies the line to
1 standard output (by default), or produces whatever other sort of output
1 you have requested with options.
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1    Though ‘grep’ expects to do the matching on text, it has no limits on
1 input line length other than available memory, and it can match
1 arbitrary characters within a line.  If the final byte of an input file
1 is not a newline, ‘grep’ silently supplies one.  Since newline is also a
1 separator for the list of patterns, there is no way to match newline
1 characters in a text.
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