Can grep show only words that match search pattern?

Question

Is there a way to make grep output \"words\" from files that match the search expression?

If I want to find all the instances of, say, \"th\" in a number of files, I

Answer 1

You can also try pcregrep. There is also a -w option in grep, but in some cases it doesn't work as expected.

From Wikipedia:

cat fruitlist.txt
apple
apples
pineapple
apple-
apple-fruit
fruit-apple

grep -w apple fruitlist.txt
apple
apple-
apple-fruit
fruit-apple