What is the difference between cat and grep?
Andrew Hansen
Published May 05, 2026
The major difference between output of grep and cat is that grep only gives a subset of the lines, whereas cat prints all lines unconditionally. If we can prevent grep from filtering out lines so it prints all of them, then it works effectively the same as cat .
How do you grep a cat?
Outputting to File:Piping into another command: This command will look for the expression "cat" in the file named file2 and output it to the word count command wc. The -l option will then list the number of lines in the grep output.