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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 302650435 by sudon't on Saturday 2nd of June 2012 11:56:37 PM
Old 06-03-2012
Now THIS may be quite what you wanted in the first place:
Code:
egrep -w '...a.....n[^^M]' /usr/share/dict/2of12.txt | head -5
advancement
arraignment
arrangement
derangement
devastating

The regular expression ends with a character range that means 'any character EXCEPT a record separator'; you may get it as a caret followed by a newline, both enclosed in brackets (open bracket, caret, control-V, newline, close bracket). Just a single tiny side-effect: I get 'self-advancement' somewhere down the list of results...[/QUOTE]

OK, that looks like it works. I need to figure out how to use that to try and strip that junk out of the file. I think we get 'self-advancement' because we didn't start with a caret. Again, why don't we need the -w flag in any other file? If you don't use it, even with the starting caret, you get longer words.

---------- Post updated at 11:43 PM ---------- Previous update was at 11:40 PM ----------

Quote:
Originally Posted by agama
This is not true. The dot does not match a newline. If it did, egrep "." file would match an empty line (^$) which it doesn't.

The problem is that there are probably ctl-M characters in the file just before the newline (Dos style newline which is 0x0d0x0a combinations rather than just a single 0x0a). Run the file through dos2unix, or someother conversion tool, which will delete the ctl-M characters from the file.

---------- Post updated at 23:36 ---------- Previous update was at 23:33 ----------

If you want an easy to verify that CTL-M characters are present, use cat:

Code:
cat -v 2of12.txt |head

This will likely generate the output:

Code:
a^M
aardvark^M
abaci^M
aback^M
abacus^M
abaft^M
abalone^M
abandon^M
abandoned^M
abandonment^M

That was it, all right!

Code:
whom^M
whomever^M
whomsoever^M
whoop^M
whoopee^M
whooper^M
whoops^M
whoosh^M
whopper^M
whopping^M
whore^M

---------- Post updated at 11:56 PM ---------- Previous update was at 11:43 PM ----------

dos2unix did the trick.
 

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

polish

POLISH(5)							      Debian								 POLISH(5)

NAME

       polish - a list of Polish words

DESCRIPTION

       /usr/share/dict/polish 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 UTF-8
       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

       Word lists are collected and maintained by various authors.

Debian Project							 March 29th, 2011							 POLISH(5)
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