Using fuzzy searches with tre-agrep
A Grep Replacement

Tre-agrep has all of grep's functionality but can also do ambiguous or fuzzy searches without deep knowledge of regular expressions.
Grep [1] is a standard command-line tool. It searches files for regular expressions, then displays any lines that include a match. In expert hands, grep
can be a flexible tool, but gaining expertise can take years of practice. Nor do related commands like egrep
[2] or fgrep
[3] make grep
any easier to use. For these reasons, those lacking expertise might want to check out TRE [4], which includes a reimplementation of agrep
(approximate grep) [5] as a command-line utility. tre-agrep
is a grep-like tool that has all of grep's functionality but can also do ambiguous or fuzzy searches that are much easier to learn.
Grep and tre-agrep share similar options, such as --ignore-case
and --count
. However, the logic of their searches can be different. (I say "can be" because often both commands have multiple ways of getting the same result.) To give a simple example, imagine that you are searching for files that contain both "Linux," and "Linus." Using grep, you would probably use regular expressions one way or the other. Probably the simplest would be:
grep 'Linu.' *.txt
[...]
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