AIX

Hi, I have a file which contains below info :

$ cat test_file
kenny
denny
kite

I want to get all th file names which starts with k. Hence i used below command but the result was not up to the mark :

$ grep 'k*' test_file
kenny
denny
kite

Can someone please explain me why this is behaving like this. Why it is giving 0 or more occurances when it should give 1 or more occurances ??

Waiting urgently ...

The regex for lines starting with k is ^k

The meaning of * is precisely "zero or more occurrences of the preceding regular expression".

The regular expression for k (implicitly, anywhere on a line) is just k -- grep looks anywhere in the line, not just at the beginning, so you have to "anchor" the search to beginning of line with ^

You are mixing shell wildcard patterns with regular expressions; these are related, but different. (In some sources shell glob patterns are called a variant of regular expressions, too, but their syntax is nevertheless different.)