I'm trying to search for lines ending with "}" with the following command but am not getting any output.

grep '\}$'  myFile.txt

this should do the work (put it inside a script) :

#!/bin/ksh

file=$1

typeset -i lineno=0

cat $file |
while read line
do
  lineno=lineno+1
  nline="${line%\}}"

  if [ "$nline" != "$line" ]
  then
    echo "$lineno ends in }"
  fi
done

Use the -v option of grep:

grep -v '}$' myFile.txt

Nope this does not give any output either.

Hi ,

Though Franklin's option works may be you can also try this

awk '{if($0~"}$"){print $0}}' <filename>

Hope this helps

Thanks. That did the trick. But can't seem to figure out how to negate this now?

BTW still can't understand why grep doesn't match this?

Could it be that the lines do not end with exactly the '}' char? Try this:

$ grep -Ev '}\s*$' file