Just wanted to write one or two of these, maybe more as time goes on: egrep: egrep -o "(['\"])root\1" This one I wanted to get either a ‘ or a ” before the word “root” and then find the closing one, whichever it was. The key here is that with egrep you have to surround the statement in quotes, the opening/closing parentheses don’t need escaping, and use a backslash followed by a number to denote the group