Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi everyone,

So I'm a bit confused about a regex pattern that should exist, but I can't really find any way to do it...

Let's say I want to match any lines that have a specific string, but I don't know the order of the letters but I know the length. Let's say it's 10 characters and begins with a V

Do I seriously have to do something like:

Code:

egrep '^N [a-z][a-z][a-z][a-z][a-z][a-z][a-z][a-z][a-z]'

It could get worse if I knew there was a number in there somewhere... Is there no way to shorten this? I know there is a quantifier that I can add, something like

\{x,y\} but I've used it and it doesn't seem to work with letters?

Is there anyway to sum up saying that you're looking for 9 letters each could be a-z?

try:

Code:

grep "^V[a-zA-Z]\{9\}\b" infile

Thanks for the quick response on a friday! Okay..so the syntax you provided sort of worked. It did return the specified value of 9...but it also returned any line that had more than 9. It basically used 9 as the minimum but it had no limit.

Also... I've been so used to using egrep...why on earth can't egrep do this, but regular grep can??

Whether your grep supports \b depends on your implementation. GNU grep can, but regular grep probably not.

So combining these remarks, try:

Code:

grep -E '^V[[:alpha:]]{9}([^[:alpha:]]|$)' file

--
grep -E is the same as grep for a POSIX compliant grep.