Question

how can I capture all lines from a text file that begin with the character “X” or contain the word “foo”?

This works:

cat text | grep '^@'  # begins with @

but I tried:

cat text | grep '^@|[foo]' 

and variations but cannot find the right syntax anywhere. how can this be done?

thanks.

Answer 1

If your grep implementation isn’t POSIX compliant, you can use egrep instead of grep:

egrep '^@|foo' text