grep command
 

Guys... I have a file temporary.c
This file contains foll. data:
example1.c
example2.c
example3.c
Now m using foll command to find all lines having .c pattern

grep "*.c" temporary.c
but it is not working.. Plz can someone help..

Try

grep ".c" temporary.c

Hello ajink,

you'll have to grep for .cyou don't need the quotesyields the same output

Markus

Markus, we need to remember that the dot in a pattern (as in regular expressions) means any single character. Maybe here we want to match a literal dot and to achieve that we have to escape it or enclose it in a character list. In any case, better to put single quotes around the pattern to prevent unwanted shell substitutions when dealing with special characters:
Just my :twocents:

Hello colucix,

I was thinking about the dot in regular expressions, but I wasn't aware that grep by default (as in this case) evaluates the '.' as the regexp for "any single character".

Thanks for pointing that out.

Markus

not grep but Ruby

The real secret here is not in grep itself, but in the regular expression pattern matching, as has been pointed out above. The grep man page has a decent starter explanation of them, so read that first. After that, get on the net and google yourself a good regex tutorial. You'll be glad you did.

But after saying that, there is a grep-specific solution too. Use -F to force it to search for fixed strings. ;)

Good shot! I always forget about the -F option! :)

It does tend to get overlooked, doesn't it?

And even I keep forgetting that grep -F is aliased to fgrep. :D

of course, in corner cases, this will not be the solution if other parts of the string contains ".c" but i digress...

I agree, one of the most important books about computers which I know is "Mastering Regular Expressions" by Jeffrey E.F. Friedl http://regex.info/you may instead search for a "c" followed by any empty stringMarkus