[plug] Grep not following my regex

[Tim Bowden]

On Tue, 2009-09-15 at 12:39 +0800, Ritchie Young wrote:
> 
>         
>         Do grep \. testfile
>         
>         and it will match every char in the file.  The '.' isn't
>         escaped by the
>         '\'.  
> 
> 
> Wouldn't that be because it's escaping the '.' for the shell but not
> grep?
> 
> 
> So 'grep \\. /etc/passwd' will output only the lines that contain a
> '.'
> 
> 
>         Using [.] does indeed treat it as a literal. 
> 
> 
> Yes, '.' inside square brackets isn't a wildcard.
>  
> To keep it simple, why not surround your entire regex with
> single-quotes.


Yes, you're right.  My snafu.

Tim Bowden