Whenever you use a simple grep command to find a single word or phrase in a file, you run the risk of getting a lot of extra “stuff” you didn’t want to see. Grep for “not” and you get “nothing”, ...

With -w, grep will match “error” but skip things like “errors” or “terror.” The difference can be subtle, but when you’re trying to be precise, it matters a lot. I use this when I’m searching through ...