Matching white space through Grep

paragkalra · 11-14-2009, 10:48 AM

Hello All,

I am trying to match white space in patterns through - Grep

I tried [[:space:]] & [[:blank:]] but none of them worked.

Then I tried Perl extension '\s' and it worked.

So just wanted to know if [[:space:]] & [[:blank:]] are still supported or have they become deprecated.

However they have been mentioned in the man page so I guess I am not using it correctly. Any pointers on how to use them?

paragkalra · 11-14-2009, 11:19 AM

Ok got it fixed....

# cat /tmp/test.ldif

Quote:

dn: ou=71404558, ou=Company, ou=Personal, o=paragkalra.com
dn: ou=40208723, ou=Company, ou=Personal, o=paragkalra.com
dn: ou=63613012, ou=Company, ou=Personal, o=paragkalra.com
dn: ou=76884580, ou=Company, ou=Personal, o=paragkalra.com

As you can see there is space between 'dn:' and 'ou=' in all the lines

Initially I was placing '\*' after [[:space:]] as shown below:

Quote:

grep -i '^dn:[[:space:]]\*\(ou=[^,]\+,\)\{1\} ou=Company, ou=Personal, o=paragkalra.com' ous.ldif

Then I removed the black slash and it worked:

Quote:

grep -i '^dn:[[:space:]]*\(ou=[^,]\+,\)\{1\} ou=Company, ou=Personal, o=paragkalra.com' ous.ldif

Quote:

dn: ou=71404558, ou=Company, ou=Personal, o=paragkalra.com
dn: ou=40208723, ou=Company, ou=Personal, o=paragkalra.com
dn: ou=63613012, ou=Company, ou=Personal, o=paragkalra.com
dn: ou=76884580, ou=Company, ou=Personal, o=paragkalra.com

PTrenholme · 11-14-2009, 11:42 AM

Since your whole expression was written inside single quotes, which turns off bash parsing, (almost) all the backslash characters in your expression were passed to grep as literal backslash characters.

See info bash under "Quoting" for details.