The grep command can be used to display the contents of a file and ignore the lines that are commented. This can be useful when quickly checking what options are enabled for certain applications without having to look through large amounts of commented text.

For this example we will use grep to ignore all lines that start with a # in a file stored on the system. The command will first take the config options that will tell grep to ignore lines that begin with a # and the second will be the location of the file that you want to read.

grep -E -v '^(#)' /tmp/filewithcomments.txt

The contents of this file are

#comment
#comment
no comment
#comment
no comment
#comment

The following output is returned when the above command is ran on this file.

[root@testserver tmp]# grep -E -v '^(#)' /tmp/filewithcomments.txt
no comment
no comment