Question

OS: FreeBSD 8.2, bash

Hey guys,

I’m stumped as to why I can’t grep the the line with / partition from df:

/dev/amrd0s1a    1012974    452694     479244    49%    /

I want to be able to grep that line only, (other lines have slashes too) so I figured one of these would work:

df -m | grep -E '\<'/'\>' 

df -m | grep -E '\</\>' 

df -m | grep -E '\<"/"\>'

but neither of those work, I was wanting to do it this way so I could practice using the ‘\< \>’. I tried with out the -E as well.

Can this be done? What am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The problem is that \< and \> are for word boundaries, but / is not a word character. Instead match the preceding whitespace and following EOL: [[:space:]]/$.