Hi,

I am getting different output for grep depending which directory I am in.
The following is a transcript of my session, I am using egrep but have also used grep –E. The directory names have been changed for security:

$pwd
/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4
$echo 000000 |egrep -v [0-1][0-9][0-5][0-9][0-5][0-9]
$echo $?
1
$cd ..
$pwd
/dir1/dir2/dir3
$echo 000000 |egrep -v [0-1][0-9][0-5][0-9][0-5][0-9]
000000
$echo $?
0
$cd ..
$pwd
/dir1/dir2
$echo 000000 |egrep -v [0-1][0-9][0-5][0-9][0-5][0-9]
$echo $?
1
$

It appears the output from egrep when run in directory /dir1/dir2/dir3 is the opposite of what I would expect

/dir1/dir2/dir3 and /dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4 are on the same volume.
I have checked and there is only one instance of egrep on the whole server.
The permissions of the directories are as follows

drwxr-xr-x /dir1/dir2
drwxrwxrwx /dir1/dir2/dir3
drwxr-xr-x /dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4

We can’t work out why this is happening. Can anyone help?

Many thanks
Helen

if there is a . in your PATH variable does it come before /usr/bin ?

There is a . in the path but it is the very last item. I have done a 'which egrep' in each of the directories and they all point to the same egrep.

It's very wierd.
Can you try

echo 00000 | /usr/bin/egrep ....

just to avoid path suspisions?

Why are you looking at egrep - it seems to me, it the echo that is messed up (or the pipe). Note that echo is actually echoing 000000 back to you instead of going through the pipe.

Also post your OS and version - I could not duplicate your problem on Solaris 2.6.

It came out with the same output

$echo 000000 |/usr/bin/egrep -v [0-1][0-9][0-5][0-9][0-5][0-9]
000000

I also tried this which was interesting:

$echo 000000 |/usr/bin/egrep -v [0-1]
$echo 000000 |/usr/bin/egrep -v [0-1][0-9]
$echo 000000 |/usr/bin/egrep -v [0-1][0-9][0-5]
$echo 000000 |/usr/bin/egrep -v [0-1][0-9][0-5][0-9]
$echo 000000 |/usr/bin/egrep -v [0-1][0-9][0-5][0-9][0-5]
$echo 000000 |/usr/bin/egrep -v [0-1][0-9][0-5][0-9][0-5][0-9]
000000
$

Its bizarre.

use the path when using the echo command instead of possibly using the shell's echo.

Also, I got mine to error with the same output by adding an extra [0-9] on the egrep.