> Try echo "$e". Then read about Word Splitting in the Bash manual.
Good point. Since no word splitting occurs within "$e", it is expanded to a string containing newlines: $ echo $e # Expansion without quotes -> word splitting x sub: f $ echo "$e" # Expansion with quotes -> no word splitting x sub: f grep then matches the empty line. Indeed, one can reproduce this with a much simpler example: $ u=$(printf 'ab\n\ncd\n') $ echo xx|grep "$u" xx So we don't have a mystery here, but rather an undocumented feature of grep (or at least not documented in the man pages of *my* version of grep): If the pattern is a string containing newline characters, grep matches each of these lines in order to every line in the input file, until a match is found. Thank you for pointing me into the right direction. Ronald -- Ronald Fischer (phone +49-89-63676431) mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Bug-bash mailing list Bug-bash@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-bash
