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Thread: grep non printable characters
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Old 06-23-2008
ripat ripat is offline Forum Advisor  
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Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: Belgium
Posts: 438
grep non printable characters
Sometimes obvious things... are not so obvious. I always thought that it was possible to grep non printable characters but not with my GNU grep (5.2.1) version.

Code:
printf "Hello\tWorld" | grep -l '\t'
printf "Hello\tWorld" | grep -l '\x09'
printf "Hello\tWorld" | grep -l '\x{09}'
None of them work. I know that work-arounds with od, cat -vet or sed are possible but why not simply with grep that is meant to do this type of job?

What am I doing wrong?