Use grep to report back only line numbers

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I have a file that possibly contains bad formatting (in this case, the occurrence of the pattern \\backslash). I would like to use grep to return only the line numbers where this occurs (as in, the match was here, go to line # x and fix it).

However, there doesn't seem to be a way to print the line number (grep -n) and not the match or line itself.

I can use another regex to extract the line numbers, but I want to make sure grep cannot do it by itself. grep -no comes closest, I think, but still displays the match.

8 Answers

Bash version

    lineno=$(grep -n "pattern" filename)
    lineno=${lineno%%:*}
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