File: grep.info,  Node: Output Line Prefix Control,  Next: Context Line Control,  Prev: General Output Control,  Up: Command-line Options

2.1.4 Output Line Prefix Control
--------------------------------

When several prefix fields are to be output, the order is always file
name, line number, and byte offset, regardless of the order in which
these options were specified.

‘-b’
‘--byte-offset’
     Print the 0-based byte offset within the input file before each
     line of output.  If ‘-o’ (‘--only-matching’) is specified, print
     the offset of the matching part itself.

‘-H’
‘--with-filename’
     Print the file name for each match.  This is the default when there
     is more than one file to search.

‘-h’
‘--no-filename’
     Suppress the prefixing of file names on output.  This is the
     default when there is only one file (or only standard input) to
     search.

‘--label=LABEL’
     Display input actually coming from standard input as input coming
     from file LABEL.  This can be useful for commands that transform a
     file's contents before searching; e.g.:

          gzip -cd foo.gz | grep --label=foo -H 'some pattern'

‘-n’
‘--line-number’
     Prefix each line of output with the 1-based line number within its
     input file.  (‘-n’ is specified by POSIX.)

‘-T’
‘--initial-tab’
     Make sure that the first character of actual line content lies on a
     tab stop, so that the alignment of tabs looks normal.  This is
     useful with options that prefix their output to the actual content:
     ‘-H’, ‘-n’, and ‘-b’.  This may also prepend spaces to output line
     numbers and byte offsets so that lines from a single file all start
     at the same column.

‘-Z’
‘--null’
     Output a zero byte (the ASCII NUL character) instead of the
     character that normally follows a file name.  For example, ‘grep
     -lZ’ outputs a zero byte after each file name instead of the usual
     newline.  This option makes the output unambiguous, even in the
     presence of file names containing unusual characters like newlines.
     This option can be used with commands like ‘find -print0’, ‘perl
     -0’, ‘sort -z’, and ‘xargs -0’ to process arbitrary file names,
     even those that contain newline characters.