Hello guys,

I'm trying to locate any template files in our file hierarchy that contain specific patterns... I'm familiar with regex... have been using it for a few years now with the assistance of regexr...

I am using Ubuntu 11.04

Now when I try using the syntax found on the man pages and many other how-to sites I never get any results, yet I know there are files with these patterns in them...

What the deal, yo?

Examples of patterns I'm using that simply do not return any results:

grep -r "radius\(" *
grep -r "maximum\-scale\=1" *
grep -r "\d+em\;" *


Any help provided on this matter is greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
S

From where did you issue the grep command? if not from the root of the tree you want to search in, try: "grep -r <pattern> /root/of/the/tree/*"

Different regex libraries often use slightly different syntaxes for the special meta-characters.

man grep(1):
Also, use single quotes unless you need variable expansion:

Hmmm isn't this example:


the exact opposite of what the man page says below?

I did read the man page before posting here btw... it doesn't seem to make any sense.

When I try with the backslash in front of the parenthesis this is the return:

I am at the root where many files have multiple lines of CSS3 border-radius styles containing the exact spelling and capitalization as: "-radius(" -In fact I can look them up and open them in the folder tree using vi or nano... however this returns 0 results:

works for me with a test file.

Do you get a match with
etc?

1 members found this post helpful.

The man page is very terse, but what it's saying is that in the default basic mode, a '(' will match a literal '(' in the text. You use '\(' for grouping, eg: 'Linux\(Questions\|Answers\)' matches 'LinuxQuestions' and also matches 'LinuxAnswers', 'Linux(Questions|Answers)' matches just the literal string 'Linux(Questions|Answers)'. If you use grep -E for extended mode, the sense of '\(' and '(' is reversed.

+1 to SecretCode's testing suggestions.