Question

I am using GNU grep on Windows 7 command prompt.

I have a file jsutfstr.txt whose content is like this:

some lines
HELLO("abc",adf)
HELLO("def", sd)
some lines
some lines
some lines

And I want to grep the HELLO(..) pattern. In the windows command prompt I used these:

C:\bin>Egrep     HELLO\(\"[^)]+\) jsutfstr.txt
HELLO("abc",adf)
HELLO("def", sd)

C:\bin>Egrep     HELLO\([^)]+\) jsutfstr.txt

So, the second pattern yields nothing. I don’t understand why I have to specify \” explicitly. Isn’t that the [^)] matches everything not equal to ) including a double quote?

Answer 1

The problem is that you run in to the shell parsing the line first and ^ is the escape character for cmd. So the line that gets passed to grep in the second case is

Egrep     HELLO\([)]+\) jsutfstr.txt

while in the first case the " starts a quoted argument where cmd will not look into.

You can just quote the complete argument to avoid that:

Egrep "HELLO\([^)]+\)" jsutfstr.txt