man bash | grep "\-d"
lots of results
man bash | grep " \-d"
no results
What’s going on here?
man bash | grep \-d lots of results man bash | grep \-d no
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man bash | grep "\-d"
lots of results
man bash | grep " \-d"
no results
What’s going on here?
It’s actually exactly what it looks like. There are no spaces, so grep doesn’t find any. If you examine the actual output of
man bash:then take a look at
datayou’ll see that what is rendered as a space on screen is actually an escape sequence. What looks like this on screen:is actually this:
Your terminal interprets these just fine. grep does not.