Hi all
I know this is a Linux forum but i am taking a course in school and we are using UNIX and we are working in the born again shell. and for a lab we have to make a list of some commands. But I am having some trouble with the grep command. I'm not asking for any one to do this for me just asking for some one to point me in the direction of a tutorial that can help me figure out witch commands to use. Or if some one wants to explain to me what commands to use that would so helpful. I know I need to use []* and <> I am just not sure how to use them in the command.

here is what I need to do.
6.) Now to play with grep. Using the file /etc/passwd, write the following greps (the basic form will be “cat /etc/passwd | grep pattern”

a) lines that have “russ”

b) users that use bash

c) users that do not use bash

d) the count of users that use bash

e) The number of users in the /home directory

f) Dead accounts (users with a false shell) and what line number they are on

Thank you so much to helps me out with this and who every does you would seriously be the coolest stranger in the world!!!

Thanks
Kev

You know, a quick look at the man page for grep would have given you all of these answers:

a) lines that have “russ”

cat /etc/passwd | grep "russ"

b) users that use bash

cat /etc/passwd | grep "bash"

c) users that do not use bash

cat /etc/passwd | grep -v "bash"

d) the count of users that use bash

cat /etc/passwd | grep "bash" | wc -l

e) The number of users in the /home directory

cat /etc/passwd | grep "/home" | wc -l

f) Dead accounts (users with a false shell) and what line number they are on

cat /etc/passwd | grep -v -n "bash"

1. I don't understand the reason of the syntax "cat /etc/passwd | grep pattern" since grep accept a file name as argument, but if your course notes do that, stick with it.

2. Do a copy of /etc/passwd and work on that (you never know...)

3. All you need is the grep command and its options, so look at man grep and start to figure it out. Take in mind that the syntax of the grep command is
where PATTERN is the word or the pattern to look for inside FILE.

Good luck!

Hey trickykid, apart the fact he/she could have tried to do the homework by him/herself, don't you think that the usage of the count option of grep would be more correct in this context?

True...somthing like...

krdan4th, you will NEVER learn Linux if you don't do your own homework...

-C

True, but then again, I went way beyond than I should have.

I did stick to the cat /etc/passwd bit they are stuck to using apparently, IMHO I would have just appended the filename at the end, etc.

that wasof lot of help..
thanx 2 trickykid

Just make sure you actually read the man page and understand it (and trickykid's answers) thoroughly.

There may also be a "regex" posix manpage that will explain using regular expressions and extended regular expressions.

Thanks a lot Trickykid! That was so much help!! when I was reading the question I was looking at it and was wonder what the hell was I supposed to do. but now that you showed me what to do i now understand what I was supposed to do and feel like a major moron now. Seeing that, that was so easy.

I am a huge noob to the whole Unix and Linux thing and not so great with using the console since windows was all point and click.

I hope to one day get completely away from windows and use just Linux ia m trying out Ubuntu at the moment and like it so far.

Thanks agian!!
Kev