egrep question

[Allanm]

I want to egrep for certain fields which are not existing in the current log files and am getting errors for that...

egrep "'^20090220.14'|'^20090220.15'|'^20090220.16'|'^20090220.17'|'^20090220.18'"

Some of the times are in future and logs don't have those entries and I get errors for them ... what should I do?

Thanks,
Allan

[Steven Schweda]

> what should I do?

First, show an actual command with its actual
output. "I get errors" is not a useful
description of what you did, nor of what
happened when you did it.

[Dennis Handly]

>I want to egrep for certain fields

Why not use just grep?
grep -e "'^20090220.14'" -e "'^20090220.15'" ...

Any reason you have single quotes inside of double? This will hide the "^" if you intend to anchor at the start of the line:
grep -e "^20090220.14" -e "^20090220.15" ...

>which are not existing in the current log files and am getting errors for that

If they don't exist, you can't find them. What grep errors would you get?

[Fredrik.eriksson]

Why not just do it like this?
egrep "^20090220\.1[4-8]" file.txt

Seems like a mess to make several "or"-statements for this.

Also, the quotation seems unneccessery as Dennis pointed out.

And you should assign some points to those who answered a week ago.

Best regards
Fredrik Eriksson