Shell Programming and Scripting

Sorry my bad, I should have been more specific. This is what i see when run the command

Code:

egrep a|b|c temp.log
-bash: a: command not found
-bash: b: command not found

The command prompt does not return after that, untill i hit CTRL+C. Is it that egrep is not allowed by my system?

That doesn't work because "a|b|c" is not in quotes. It has to be, or the shell assumes you're running

Code:

egrep a | b | c

It freezes because 'egrep a' is not given a filename and tries to read from standard input.

Kudos for trying to test the solution instead of just copypasting though!

You definitely have egrep.

Perhaps the debug output line should have been:

Code:

echo egrep \""${ARR[*]}"\" $FILE

Giving:

Code:

$ ./script.sh

egrep "a|b|c|d" file1
egrep "e|f" file2
egrep "g|h|i|j|k|l" file3

$

Thanks guys...it really helped. Appreciate your help

---------- Post updated 10-19-11 at 04:56 PM ---------- Previous update was 10-18-11 at 05:16 PM ----------

One more question to related to the egrep. Your earlier suggestions work fine, but I have a little more complex issue. Like earlier suggested in am using

Code:

egrep "a|b|c|d" file1

and it works fine, but it also get the other matching patterns of a. For example my file also has some text like:

Code:

xxxayyy , xyza and a

Currently it gets every thing like: "xxxayyy", "xyza" and "a" and I just want to get "a" from the file and not other text can you please suggest how can i use the above " egrep" to filter these and not .

Thanks in advance ...

Try using the \b word boundries like this:

Code:

egrep "\ba\b|\bword\b" files

Thanks guys.... you guys are amazing. Please continue the good work.