I'm looking for information on the -X option of curl. However, the documentation is quite lengthy and I have to scroll down for quite a long time to get to this option. Instead, I'd like to do something like
man curl | grep -X
to get the line containing "-X". (I would also do this in conjunction with the option -A 10 to get the 10 lines after the match). However, if I try this I get
grep: option requires an argument -- 'X'
Usage: grep [OPTION]... PATTERN [FILE]...
Try 'grep --help' for more information.
Any ideas on how to use grep together with man, or more generally on how to search man pages for specific lines?
You have to tell grep that -X is not an option, but the pattern to look for:
man curl | grep -- '-X'
-- indicates the end of options. Without it, grep thinks that -X is an option.
Alternatively, you can use -e to indicate that what follows is a pattern:
man curl | grep -e '-X'
If you want to see the complete man page but skip directly to the first occurrence of -X, you can use a command line option to less:
man curl | less +/-X
Typing N repeatedly then takes you to the following occurrences.