Hi,

I am trying to do something with grep, but for some reason I just can't get it to to work.

I am looking for find a match in the second field, the length must be 10 characters and end with 'abc'.

The file is in this format:
<int><tab><field2>

I've tried a few patterns, some work, but they never work exactly how I expect them to.

This pattern: grep -i '[\t]\(.\)\{7\}abc$'

For some reason matches any lines where field 2 begins with the letter 't', the same goes for any letter used, [\s] doesn't match whitespaces either.

Thanks.

Try using a tab instead of \t, i. e., actually press the tab key.

Thanks for the help, it actually worked!

It's strange though, I looked at many examples and tutorials on this and most of them have examples of using \t. I can't get tab to work in my OS X terminal, there's probably a way of doing it with different representations of the %09 character. It was only for a shell command within a script so it works fine.

Thanks again.