Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi
Pretty sure this is very simple hence im banging my head o the wall as to why i cant get this to work:

Im greping against many files where there will be the following string:

Date: Thu, Aug 23 2001 09:27 PM

(of course values such as date ,time and PM/AM will vary.)

Im trying to grep where I match the first word being Date:
and the last word will be either PM or AM.

I tried

Code:

grep '^Date:.$PM' *

but I get nothing back.

Code:

egrep "^Date:.*[AP]M$" file(s)

will find all records containing Date: as the first token, and either AM or PM as the last token.

In your example, the single dot following "Date:" would match just one character. To match any number of characters you need .* You also need to move the dollar sign to the end of the string. Specifying $PM will cause the shell to substitute the value of the variable PM whch might not be set and thus evaluate to nil in your pattern.

If there are tokens after the PM/AM in the file, then this won't work; drop the dollar sign and you should be OK.