grep a file, but show several surrounding lines?

I would like to grep for a string, but also show the preceding five lines and the following five lines as well as the matched line. How would I be able to do this?

Solution 1:

For BSD or GNU grep you can use -B num to set how many lines before the match and -A num for the number of lines after the match.

grep -B 3 -A 2 foo README.txt

If you want the same number of lines before and after you can use -C num.

grep -C 3 foo README.txt

This will show 3 lines before and 3 lines after.

Solution 2:

-A and -B will work, as will -C n (for n lines of context), or just -n (for n lines of context... as long as n is 1 to 9).

Solution 3:

ack works with similar arguments as grep, and accepts -C. But it's usually better for searching through code.

Solution 4:

grep astring myfile -A 5 -B 5

That will grep "myfile" for "astring", and show 5 lines before and after each match