egrep is a pattern searching command which belongs to the family of grep functions. It works the same way as grep -E does. It treats the pattern as an extended regular expression and prints out the lines that match the pattern.

What is grep and egrep in Linux?

Grep stands for “Global Regular Expressions Print“, were as Egrep for “Extended Global Regular Expressions Print”. The pattern often treated as a regular expression, for which e in egrep stands for “Extended Regular Expressions” abbreviated ‘ERE’ is enabled in egrep.

What is egrep?

egrep is an acronym for “Extended Global Regular Expressions Print“. It is a program which scans a specified file line by line, returning lines that contain a pattern matching a given regular expression.