On Sun, Feb 05, 2012 at 04:03:45PM -0500, Neal Murphy wrote:
> For quite some time now, I've been getting peeved with egrep not doing what
> it
> should.
>
> I have Squeese installed and up-to-date. In an xterm running bash or on a
> console running bash or dash, this command:
> ls -C1 | egrep "^[A-Z]"
> returns all lines except those beginning with 'a'.
Hi,
When I try, in my home directory:
ls -C1 | egrep "^[A-Z]"
I get stuff like you probably expect:
Acrobat Reader
Class
Desktop
Downloads
Mail
Maildir
(Note: you probably don't need -C1 if you are piping
the output. ls is smart enough to do that for you
automatically.)
To get the output you complain about -- all lines
except beginning with 'a' you might use:
ls | grep "^[^a]"
(In the expression [^somechars], The ^ means to negate
the character class representated by "somechars")
Or more simply, reverse the sense of "^a"
ls | grep -v "^a"
There is a weirdly named program '[', (see "man ["),
but I doubt it is getting invoked here.
Please recheck you tests and let us know.
> Even the following commands
> exhibit similar behavior:
> alias|sed -e 's/^a/b/'|egrep "^[A-Z]" # passes sed's output untouched
> alias|sed -e 's/^a/A/'|egrep "^[A-Z]" # passes sed's output untouched
>
> These commands behave the same way on another Squeeze installation at another
> location. Also, 'grep -E' behaves the same way.
>
> The commands behave as expected on a different GNU/Linux system.
>
> Does anyone else see this behavior? Or do I need to clean my pipe and smoke
> something better?
That could explain it. Unix often obeys its own rules.
HTH,
> Thanks,
> N
>
>
> --
--
Joel Roth
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