grepc(1) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | CAVEATS | EXAMPLES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

grepc(1)                 General Commands Manual                 grepc(1)

NAME         top

       grepc - find declarations, definitions, and uses in source code

SYNOPSIS         top

       grepc [option ...] pattern [file ...]

DESCRIPTION         top

       grepc(1) searches for declarations, definitions, and/or uses of
       pattern in each source file.

       pattern is a PCRE pattern.  It normally represents an identifier,
       and word boundaries are implicitly added to it in most cases.

       If no file is given, this program reads standard input.
       Otherwise, it reads all files specified, and searches under any
       specified directories, recursively, without following symbolic
       links.

OPTIONS         top

       -A n   Print n lines of trailing context after a match.

       -B n   Print n lines of leading context before a match.

       -C n   Print n lines of context surrounding a match.

       -c     Do not print matches, and instead print a count of them.

       -h     Suppress the prefixing of file names on output.

       -i     Ignore case distinctions in pattern.

       -l     Suppress normal output; instead print the name of each
              input file from which output would normally have been
              printed.  Each file is only printed once.

       -m n   Stop processing after finding n matches.

       -n     Prefix each line of output with the 1-based line number
              within its input file.

       -t type
              Restrict the search to a specific type of code.  This
              option can be passed multiple times to search for various
              types of code.  The acceptable values depend on the driver
              used for the language.  See grepc_c(1), which is the
              default driver.

CAVEATS         top

   Crashes
       In some cases, internal calls to pcre2grep(1) may fail after
       consuming too much resources.  To solve that, use -t to restrict
       the types of code of your search.

   Seekable files
       Files specified in the command line must be seekable and able to
       be opened twice.  If you need to read a non-seekable file,
       redirect it to the standard input.

EXAMPLES         top

       alx@devuan:/usr/lib/gcc$ grepc -n alignof .;
       ./x86_64-linux-gnu/15/include/stdalign.h:33:#define alignof _Alignof

SEE ALSO         top

       grepc_c(1), pcre2grep(1), pcre2syntax(3), pcre2pattern(3)

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the man-pages (Linux kernel and C library
       user-space interface documentation) project.  Information about
       the project can be found at 
       ⟨https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/⟩.  If you have a bug report
       for this manual page, see
       ⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/CONTRIBUTING⟩.
       This page was obtained from the tarball man-pages-6.18.tar.gz
       fetched from
       ⟨https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/⟩ on
       2026-05-24.  If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML
       version of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-
       to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or
       improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not
       part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org

Linux man-pages 6.18            2025-11-09                       grepc(1)

Pages that refer to this page: grepc(1)grepc_c(1)