Grep -o used in solution for the Little Women exercise but never explained

[colinsauze]

What is the problem?

The "Little Women" exercise in the finding things episode uses grep -o but never explains what grep -o does or why it is used here. There isn't any hint in the exercise to lookup this option in the manpage/help either.

Without using -o a slightly different answer comes up because some lines contain a name twice and using -o counts all instances, not using it will count them all as one. A possible workaround could be to ask for the number of lines containing each person, not the number of times their name appears in the text.

Location of problem (optional)

https://swcarpentry.github.io/shell-novice/07-find.html

[bkmgit]

Thanks for raising this. Maybe it is worth adding a hint. Would you want to make a pull request with an improvement?

[colinsauze]

I can do, but it is going to be a few weeks until I have the spare time to do this.