Question

I’m asking this as a new question because people didn’t seem to understand my original question.

I can figure out how to find if a word starts with a capital and is followed by 9 letters with the code:

echo "word" | grep -Eo '^[A-Z][[:alpha:]]{8}'

So that’s part 1 of what I’m supposed to do. My actual script is supposed to loop through each word in a text file that is given as the first and only argument, then check if any of those words start with a capital and are 9 letters long.

I’ve tried:

cat textfile | grep -Eo '^[A-Z][[:alpha:]]{8}'

and

while read p
do echo $p | grep -Eo '^[A-Z][[:alpha:]]{8}' 
done < $1

to no avail.

Although:

cat randomtext.txt 

outputs:

The loud Brown Cow jumped over the White Moon. November October tesTer Abcdefgh Abcdefgha

so it’s correctly outputting all the words in the file randomtext.txt

then why wouldn’t

cat randomtext.txt | grep -Eo '^[A-Z][[:alpha:]]{8}'

work?

Answer 1

The problem is in the anchor. Your pattern starts with ^ which matches the beginning of a line, but the word you want to get returned is in the middle of a line. You can replace it with \b to match at a word boundary.