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Full Discussion: Unexpected Behaviour from grepping Text File
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Unexpected Behaviour from grepping Text File Post 302650413 by sudon't on Saturday 2nd of June 2012 08:49:58 PM
Old 06-02-2012
Unexpected Behaviour from grepping Text File
Hi!
I recently downloaded a wordlist file called 2of12.txt, which is a wordlist of common words, part of the 12dicts package. I've been getting unexpected results from grepping it, such as getting no matches when clearly there ought to be, or returns that are simply wrong.
Par exemple:

Code:
egrep ^...a.....n.$ /usr/share/dict/2of12.txt |head -5

apparition
bipartisan
cavalryman
defamation
dilatation

Clearly I'm asking for an eleven-letter word, and getting ten-letter words, (but at least the letters I'm asking for are in the right places). If I grep any other wordlist, I get the expected results.

Code:
egrep ^...a.....n.$ /usr/share/dict/sowpods.txt |head -5

advancement
advantaging
alkalescent
alkalifying
antalkaline

But if I add an extra dot at the end, I get the correct results. Well, not the correct results, but you know what I mean:

Code:
egrep ^...a.....n..$ /usr/share/dict/2of12.txt |head -5

advancement
arraignment
arrangement
derangement
devastating

I opened 2of12.txt in TextWrangler, showing invisibles, to see if there were some kind of extra white space characters in there, but I could see nothing wrong. It looks like they're all single words, followed by a newline.
Something must be wrong with this file, but I have no idea what it might be. I had read here 12dicts - Helpful that the file contained annotations after certain words, but I can find none of these. Does anyone have any idea what might cause this behaviour in a text file? If so, how can I find and fix this problem?
Thanks!
 

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

irish

WORDS(5)						     Linux Programmers Manual							  WORDS(5)

NAME

       irish - a list of Irish words

DESCRIPTION

       /usr/share/dict/irish is an ASCII file which contains an alphabetic list of words, one per line.

FILES

       /etc/dictionaries-common/words  is  a  symbolic	link  to  a  /usr/share/dict/<language> file.  /usr/share/dict/words is a symbolic link to
       /etc/dictionaries-common/words, and is the name by which other software	should	refer  to  the	system	word  list.   See  select-default-
       wordlist(8) for more information.

       The directory /usr/share/dict can contain word lists for many languages, with name of the language in English, e.g., /usr/share/dict/french
       and /usr/share/dict/danish contain respectively lists of French and Danish words if they exist.	Such lists should be coded using  the  ISO
       8859-1 character set encoding.

SEE ALSO

       ispell(1), select-default-wordlist(8), and the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

HISTORY

       The words lists are not specific, and may be generated from any number of sources.

       The  system word list used to be /usr/dict/words.  For compatibility, software should check that location if /usr/share/dict/words does not
       exist.

AUTHOR

       Alastair McKibstry <mckinstry@computer.org> Kevin Scannell

Linux								   29 Sept 1998 							  WORDS(5)
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