Hi Bill. The issues are your unerstanding of regular expressions.
> I had hoped to find a help list because this may be my problem, but here > goes: > > grep --color '^[[:alpha:]]*' xxx > Lists every line including blank lines, highlighting leading alpha strings. Correct. The * means zero or more alphabetic characters, and ^ means beginning of line. The ^ always matches every line, even though the [[:alpha:]]* may not. > grep --color '^[[:alpha:]][[:alpha:]]*' xxx > Lists every line starting with an alpha and highlights all leading alphas. > This is what I wanted, so I tried rewriting the spec as: > > grep --color '^[[:alpha:]]+' xxx > lists nothing. For grep, you need '^[[:alpha:]]\+'. HTH, Arnold
