On Friday 15 February 2008, Meir wrote: > I am trying to check that a file does not contain lines with terminating > tabs (see attached). The file is about 1000 lines long in the format of > <word><tab><tab><word><CR>, yet my "grep" finds 5 lines with terminating > tabs. I checked the file with a binary editor - nope! > > all the info (input, output, version, and one "good" line for comparison) > is included in the attached file, which also appears below. > > I run the same test on Ubantu and on SuSE 9.3 WITH THE SAME RESULTS (i.e. > the same 5 lines are WRONGLY identified!)
you are not correctly passing the regex to grep. grep is correctly identifying the lines based on the regex it received. > \cygwin\bin\grep -n "[a-z]*\t\t[a-z]*\t" input.txt you did not correctly pass the back slash to grep. grep instead sees: "[a-z]*tt[a-z]*t" and considering the lines you say grep showed, sounds like grep is working perfectly fine. please consult your shell documentation for how to correctly pass back slashes to programs (hint: you should have escaped them: \\t) -mike
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