help on grep command

[Alan Buenaventura]

Is there an option for grep on hpux to search for (just) a word? Suppose a file contains the ff.

line 1:abc def gef
line 2:ab cdef hig

How could grep search for the word "ab" only (on line 2) and ignore "abc" (on line 1)?

Thanks.

[Vikas Khator · Accepted solution]

Hi ,

egrep -e " ab |^ab | ab$"

Note that first condition has blank space before ab and after ab .

Second condition has a blank space at end .

Third condition has blank space in front.

Hope this helps.

[Patrick Wallek]

I think I saw on a previous post that there is a '-x' option to grep that lets you grep for exact matches.

So the following:

grep -x ab testfile

[Bruce Regittko_1]

Hi,

According to the man page for grep(1), the -x option matches the entire line, not a whitespace delimited word. Sorry,

--Bruce

[Dan Hetzel]

Hi Alan,

Victor's suggestion is good, but a more general approach would be with using regular expressions character classes:
(see man 5 regexp for details)

echo "ab c def ghi" | grep -e "[[:space:]]ab[[:space:]]|^ab[[:space:]]|[[:space:]]ab$"

The [:space:] character class matches all characters producing white space on the displayed text

Best regards,

Dan

[Joseph C. Denman]

grep 'ab ' filename