using grep to find text ending with apostrophe

ChristinaCann · 02-23-2015, 06:30 AM

Help!

I have an assignment question where I have to grep an expression which will find the name 'Name' as well as 'name's".

I went through the listed comments for apostrophe, but I wasn't successful.

Any ideas?

linosaurusroot · 02-23-2015, 07:03 AM

http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/rules.html

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Ser Olmy · 02-23-2015, 07:35 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ChristinaCann

I have an assignment question where I have to grep an expression which will find the name 'Name' as well as 'name's".

I went through the listed comments for apostrophe, but I wasn't successful.

The apostrophe is one of several characters that have special meaning in the shell environment, so in order to be interpreted literally, it must be "escaped" by another special character, the backslash.

allend · 02-23-2015, 08:07 AM

Quote:

it must be "escaped" by another special character, the backspace.

Er, small typo there. Methinks that should read backslash, not backspace.

Ser Olmy · 02-23-2015, 08:46 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by allend

Er, small typo there. Methinks that should read backslash, not backspace.

Absolutely, thanks for pointing that out. I've corrected the post accordingly.

Although you must admit that using backspace will eliminate any issues one might experience if a command line argument contains apostrophes.

allend · 02-23-2015, 08:55 AM

Absolutely admitted.

Miati · 02-23-2015, 09:01 AM

I would suggest reading through the man pages of grep.
To help, you're looking for something that would probably ignore case (name versus Name) and/or searches that can include multiple search patterns (Name' or name's)