Question

I have the following grep query

 $ grep -nr "ActiveChild\s*=" .

This finds all instances of ActiveChild followed by whitespace-

 ActiveChild = "ABC"
    ActiveChild = "PQR"
 ActiveChild = "XYZ"

However, it also gives me results like

 If ActiveChild = "LMN" Then

I want to avoid the above case. I want to ensure that “ActiveChild” is the first word that appears on the line that I am searching. It doesn’t matter if there is whitespace before it. Unfortunately, writing something like

 grep -nr "\s*ActiveChild\s*=" .

doesn’t help at all. How can I write such a query? Also, is “query” the right word, or is something else used in the context of grep?

Answer 1

kent$  cat test
 ActiveChild = "ABC"
    ActiveChild = "PQR"
 ActiveChild = "XYZ"
 If ActiveChild = "LMN" Then

kent$  grep -E '^\s*ActiveChild\s*=' test
 ActiveChild = "ABC"
    ActiveChild = "PQR"
 ActiveChild = "XYZ"