I got it to fly by putting a space followed by a tab inside the "[]". Some dummy test files had various combinations of space(s) and tab(s) in front of "*>", and these did not show up.
In SCO Unix, I have a working script to give me a list of COBOL (files end in .cbl) programs containing a specific variable ($1) on a line which is not a comment. The output of the first grep will...