How-to: Use the grep command on a FortiGate

Grep is a fast and easy way of filtering lots of information from the console. The FortiGate allows you to pipe grep to many commands including show, get and diagnose.

To use grep you must pipe it with the search value after a command ex: | grep <value>

There are a few options available with grep that can be seen with the -h flag. Below is a show command that's been piped with grep to display all the options available:

gate1 # show | grep -h
Usage: grep [-invfcABC] PATTERN
Options:
        -i      Ignore case distinctions
        -n      Print line number with output lines
        -v      Select non-matching lines
        -f      Print fortinet config context
        -c      Only print count of matching lines
        -A      Print NUM lines of trailing context
        -B      Print NUM lines of leading context
        -C      Print NUM lines of output context