grep: outputting search strings

[tapmas]

Newbie question -- any help very much appreciated: I want to be able to get grep (or whatever else would work) to return not only matching lines, but also the original input string:

An example may help: Suppose I have two files data1.txt and data2.txt:

data1.txt

Hello my name is foo.
What is your name?
Shall we meet at the bar?
Perhaps they will have food.

data2.txt

foo bar foo bar
barbarbarbar
xxxxx
yyyyy
foofoofoo


The command:

grep "foo" *.txt > test.out

returns:

data1.txt:Hello my name is foo.
data1.txt:Perhaps they will have food.
data2.txt:foo bar foo bar
data2.txt:foofoofoo


I would like the command to also include, at the beginning of the line, my original search string (in this case "foo"). Is this possible using grep or perhaps awk, or, something else?

Thanks in advance for your help.

[oberon]

Hi,
one solution is to make a simple shell script. Put the following in a file called e.g. mygrep:

!/bin/sh
search=$1 #Use first argument as searchword
shift 1 #Remove searchword from argument list
grep $search $* | awk -v search="`echo $search`" {'print search ": " $0'}

You can then run the script with ./mygrep foo *.txt.