Shell Programming and Scripting

I'm new to egrep. What pattern could I use to find all lines that match this pattern: <beginning of line><any amount of whitespace>sub<space>. I want it to return the entire line.

(I'm trying to generate a list of all Perl sub definitions in a list of Perl modules.)

Thanks for your help!

First, it's suggested to use grep -E instead of egrep, since it's more portable.
Second, pretty much the same pattern that you would use in Perl.

1. Portability isn't a concern to me since I'm not going to deploy this command.

2. What pattern would I use in Perl then?

can you post sample input you want to grep

I have a collection of Perl code files which define several subs. Most appear to have some whitespace (spaces or tabs) before the first line of the sub definition:

sub subname {

I want to use egrep (or grep -E) to find all these, because simple grep for the word sub returns lots of lines I don't want to see (like Perl comments and things in quotes).

Examples of lines I don't want to see:
# sub subname {
print "This sub does something"

Portability doesn't have anything to do with deployment IMO, but should be looked after by the developer.
And the pattern you're looking for is

Code:

^[[:space:]]*sub[[:space:]]+ #grep -E
^\s*sub\s+ #perl

say you don't want lines with "# sub subname " and want only "sub subname {" to be listed.

grep -v "# sub subname" *.perl | grep -h "sub subname {"
grep -v "# sub subname" ./* | grep -h "sub subname {"