topic Re: Difference between grep and egrep in Operating System - HP-UX

Difference between grep and egrep

Trenta Angelo — Mon, 15 Jul 2002 15:28:41 GMT

Hi all,

I???d like to kow the meaning of this code lines,
Why it is using ???egrep??? instead of grep?

......................................
#Runs the utility in report mode
xsm_check_erregistrations -r 0 > /tmp/log 2>&1

if [ ! -a /tmp/log ]
then
#no stale registrations
exit 0
fi
stalereglist='egrep "Stale ER Client:" /tmp/log | awk -F ":" '[print $4]''
.............................................

What is, in general, the difference between grep and egrep?

Regards, Angelo Trenta

Re: Difference between grep and egrep

Jeanine Kone — Mon, 15 Jul 2002 15:31:27 GMT

According to the man pages:

egrep is maintained for backward compatibility. It has been replaced with the -E option of grep (for Extended regular expressions).

Re: Difference between grep and egrep

A. Clay Stephenson — Mon, 15 Jul 2002 15:33:29 GMT

egrep is a fairly archaic command these days. The preferred method is to use grep -E rather than egrep. The difference is that the regular expression processing is more powerful in egrep (or -E) at the cost of speed. In your example, it appears that grep would work as well. The other major difference is that multiple patterns can be specified in the 'extended' version.

Man grep for more details.

Re: Difference between grep and egrep

V. V. Ravi Kumar_1 — Mon, 15 Jul 2002 15:34:57 GMT

hi,

grep is used to search for a single pattern

ex: grep
whereas egrep searches multiple expression at a time

ex: egrep ' expression2>

in ur case it is searching any of Stale ER or Client.

regds

Re: Difference between grep and egrep

James R. Ferguson — Mon, 15 Jul 2002 15:35:40 GMT

Hi:

'egrep' stands for "extended" grep. If you use the '-E' option of 'grep' you will achieve the same functionality. Similarly, the '-F' option of 'grep' yields fixed-string searches in lieu of using 'fgrep'. See the man pages for 'grep' for more information.

Regards!

...JRF...

Re: Difference between grep and egrep

MANOJ SRIVASTAVA — Mon, 15 Jul 2002 15:44:20 GMT

Hi Angela

You may like to look at this

:http://www.ntlug.org/archive/tp/shell_ccox/img8.htm

Manoj Srivastava