A rarely used but very useful option in grep
I usually do a lot of log analysis. I search for patterns in multiple files in multiple hosts. Then I collate the result and do processing on the result lines. A sample output looks like: /tmp/input1.txt: line containing pattern /tmp/input2.txt: another line containing pattern As it turns out, I don't need the file names in the grep result. I always used to remove the file name prefixes using a Perl one-liner. Silly me! I was pretty sure that this was a common problem and it must have been solved already. When I referred to the man page of grep , I came across this gem: -h . If you specify this option, grep will not prefix each line with a the file name. There is also -H option which will prefix each line with a filename even if you are searching in only one file.