Shell Programming and Scripting

copying the file the contents of the file and saving it to a different location with same name makes grep work.

but i cannot perform this copy function everyday.

doing dos2unix on the actual file did not help.

what other ways can i search for a string instead of grep?

If following doesn't work, than I really don't know any other solution.

Code:

$ cat 153_eveningtime_done_log.txt | grep -i "invalid"

If there is nothing sensitive in the data file, why not attach it to a post so that everyone can examine it? Or, remove extraneous lines until you have created a minimal file, free of sensitive information, that still "misbehaves" when grepped, and attach that. In either case, do not copy/paste as that can modify the data.

If you do attach a file, please make sure to mention which operating system you are using? And, if you know, which implementation of grep (if this is a linux system or cygwin, it's almost certainly gnu's grep).

Alternative ways to search a file for a word include sed, awk, sh read/case glob, perl, python, ... etc. Although, if that were my file, I'd really want to know what is going on. Without knowing what's going on, you could be experiencing other false negatives and not even know it.

Regards,
Alister