regex - grep only the exact match line

Question

I am trying to grep the exact match line.

grep '^listen' /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf

listen = /run/php-fpm/www.sock
listen.acl_users = apache,nginx
listen.allowed_clients = 127.0.0.1

I want it to show only the following

listen = /run/php-fpm/www.sock

not the other lines. how to do that?.

Answer 1

You may use this grep to make sure there is at least one space or tab character or = after matching listen at start:

grep  '^listen[=[:blank:]]' file

or do string comparison of first field using awk:

awk -F '[=[:blank:]]+' '$1 == "listen"' file