On Fri, May 1, 2020 at 10:07 AM <radisso...@web.de> wrote: > Hi, > i had the problem of searching for a non-printable character in a long > list of strings. I found nothing the documentation and but several discussion > how to do that where either complicated or did not fit for my case, maybe i > was unlucky, ntl i found a simple solution that should be mentioned in the > documentation. > > problem: grep for a character where only the hexcode in known. > > solution: use $'\xNN' > then shell expands this to the required code > > example: printf "A\nB\nC\n" | grep $'\x41' > > note: that uses only printable characters, it works also with anything else > except \0 (i guess). > > i found that solution nice, it did no require any flags etc, for my problem it > worked like a charm. > (i am not member of the list please reply directly to this address) .
Thank you for the suggestion. Another approach is to use grep's -P option: $ printf '%s\n' A B C| grep -P '\x41' A If you'd like to add an example to the documentation, please send a patch, but I'm not sure how much of PCRE syntax we want to document in grep's own manual.
