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Asked: 2026-06-14T16:04:54+00:00

I would expect that the regular expression ^[a-z]*$ would not match random$something However, this

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I would expect that the regular expression ^[a-z]*$ would not match random$something

However, this matches when I try it on the shell:

~# echo "random$something" | grep "^[a-z]*$"
random

~# echo "aaaaa$something" | grep "^a*$"
aaaaa

Why is this happening?

I’ve seen this on both Solaris and RedHat Linux.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Note that if you just do

    echo "aaaaa$something"

    without the grep, the result is

    aaaaa

    This is because the shell is trying to interpret $something as a variable.
    If you change the double quotes to single quotes, you’ll see the expected behavior; that is no result.

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