~Stack~: > > But that would match against 9_asD which begins with a number (not what > I wanted). So I tried: > [_a-zA-Z][_a-zA-Z0-9]* > > I realize that the expression won't do what I mistakenly thought I > wanted it to do. What is puzzling to me is that my hard disk usage > peaked, my cpu jumped, and grep took almost two minutes to return an > exit code of 1 (no match). :-/
What was your exact command line? Did you quote the regular expression?
My guess is that the shell interpreted the '*' character for you and you
ended up with a command line like this:
$ grep [_a-zA-Z][_a-zA-Z0-9]file1 file2 file3
where file1 etc. are the files in your current directory. That's why
grep took so long to finish and it didn't find anything because file1 is
part of your regexp.
J.
--
Scientists know what they are talking about.
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<http://www.slowlydownward.com/NODATA/data_enter2.html>
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