UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I used to create a file to read my patterns and call them with grep but now I want to use different sort of patterns and it does not work with a list on a accept file

Code:

Grep –F  –f acceptfile.txt mainfile.txt > outputfile.txt

I have a data like this as they are in sequence of 5

I have a list of words (the, of, and) and I am looking for a pattern of

note: I seem to have problem with of and off and coffee as well


Basically a loop to go through each of them one by one…
Not sure if that’s possible but even if not I am more than happy to predefine all my patterns in the file
But now that I put that patterns in the file and call them, the output file is empty
Can you tell me what am I doing wrong ?
Thank you in advance
A-V

You have to escape metacharacters

Code:

 
file.*  
Becomes:
file.\*

or put each line inside single tics. Also grep -F means "do not use metcharacters (regexp)" so even if it gets read in correctly it won't work.

if can write a single line which will work and that is

Code:

grep 'The.* of' main.txt > output.txt

and it shows 90% correctly
but I have so many Patterns that I was thinking to create a file for them I have 10 words so each of them when compared with others will mean I have 100 patterns.

ideally I want to delete the words which are around the pattern as well so I would life to have a list which will be


but first need to find a way for my 100 patterns

We need more information than 'my patterns', we need examples of what you consider to be a pattern and what you expect it to match in your data in order to help you. The things you show with the * may be valid patterns, I cannot tell.

my data looks like


I have a list of words that need to make a pattern of them

the output should look like


but because I have loads of patterns, I want to same those patterns in a file and call it

You can save it to a file:

Code:

the.*
the
the.*of 
of.*of 
of.*the

Depending on your version of grep - if it is a modern grep the above will work like this

Code:

grep -f pattern_file search_file

Might it be easier to put your data through tr -s ' \t' ' ' first, so you never need to worry about multiple spaces?