Question

I am using grep to find out all occurences of a VB function call. I give the command this way –

   grep -n "FunctionX" FormX.frm

   1814:       FunctionX
   2682:    FunctionX
   3020:'    FunctionX
   3292:Private Sub FunctionX()
   3333:On Error GoTo FunctionX_Err
   3388: '  GoTo FunctionX_Exit
   3394:GoTo FunctionX_Exit
   3456:FunctionX_Err:
   3460:FunctionX_Exit:

But as you can see, it also gave me instances where it was not a function call. For a VB function call, the function name is not followed by anything, so I assumed that it’s a function call followed by whitespace. I tried –

    grep -nr "FunctionX[[:space:]]" FormX.frm

However, this gave me no results. Is this because “\n” is not considered to be whitespace? Every call to FunctionX in the code is followed by a “\n”. If so, how do I get the desired result? Please help me out. Thanks.

Answer 1

Try matching on the end of line

 grep -nr 'FunctionX[[:space:]]*$' FormX.frm

Remember grep is looking at the input line-by-line, so it’s not going to be seeing the carriage returns. The pattern above finds any line that ends with FunctionX with some possible (real) whitespace following it before the end-of-line.