[SOLVED] Grep words made up of a single dot

Fiatuno · 05-02-2015, 05:17 PM

Hi,

grep "\." gives me
...
..
.

So does grep -w "\."

I need only
.

Thanks in advance

Keith Hedger · 05-02-2015, 05:30 PM

It would be nicje to see a sample of the file(s) you are trying to grep, moere info please, your grep command os ok it is matching a single . ... .. . ALL contain single dots you need to add some info around the dot to make it more specific hence we need to know what you are using as source data, try '\b\.\b' this is a single dot bounded by normal word boundary's. space tab newline etc

Fiatuno · 05-02-2015, 05:56 PM

Thank you Keith,

This is an extract of my file. It's an index.
'\b\.\b' didn't work

. 480
. 481
. 482
. 483
. 484
... 212

Keith Hedger · 05-02-2015, 06:01 PM

try '^\. '
^ anchors to the start of the linr then a asingle dot then a space, you may have to use -e before tge regex to grep.
or try sed -n '/^\. /pg' /path/to/your/file, whichwill print all lines that start '. '

Fiatuno · 05-03-2015, 02:48 AM

Hi Keith,

'^\. ' worked, I didn't have to use -e.

Thank you very much!