Searching A File Without Having To Open It

[Andrew Kaplan]

One of our servers has a large mail.log file that I would like to search for a specific string. Is there a command that I can use to do so without having to open the file first? Thanks.

[Pete Randall]

grep 'string' filename

Pete

[harry d brown jr]

Sorry, but all commands are going to "open" the file, it's just the way it works.

Try "grep"

grep STRING filename

Waht are you trying to "extract" from the mail.log file?

live free or die
harry

[Stanimir]

cat ./mail.log | grep "string" | more