Find pattern using grep (egrep)

One of the quickest and easiest ways to find patterns in a huge file without writing any scripts is through unix grep. I find it extremely useful to fetch strings having a certain pattern.

Looking for Tabs:

Many manuals don't say a lot about finding a tab character in a pattern. If you have a pattern "gene TAB exon", then the way to look for the file would be:

grep 'gene[[:blank:]]exon'