Which command would you use to search for a specific pattern within files?

The command used to search for a specific pattern within files is grep. This command is specifically designed for pattern matching and can scan through text in files to find lines that match the specified search criteria. It's commonly used in combination with regular expressions, allowing for flexible and powerful searching capabilities.

When executing grep, you can specify the pattern you're looking for and the files to search through. For example, using grep "pattern" file.txt will return all lines in file.txt that contain "pattern". This makes grep an essential tool for text processing and analysis in a Linux environment.

While sort, find, and awk serve their own purposes, they do not focus on searching for patterns in the same way. Sort arranges lines of text in a specified order, find locates files and directories based on specific criteria like name or size, and awk is a programming language designed for pattern scanning and processing but is typically used for more complex data manipulation rather than simple pattern searching within files.