Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi, I'm a little confused with the grep options and can't seem to find the correct one I need. I basically want to grep a file for a word with the pattern in it. I tried:

Code:

grep -w word file

But this just returns word if it's in there somewhere. I want the full word that that pattern is in so if my file looks like

this is a file
and here is someword

I want it to return:

someword

work with returncodes...

Code:

grep -w yourword yourfile 2>/dev/null
if [ $? -eq "0" ]
then
 echo "yourword found"
else
 echo "yourword NOT found"
fi

do a little finetuning on the above "script" to fit your needs...

hth,
DN2

Add the -o option.

Code:

grep -ow pattern inpufile

Jean-Pierre.

hmm the -ow option didnt seem to work. I tried changing the ordering of it too but it didnt return anything at all. Do I need to pipe it or anything?

grep -ow word will find "word" but not "someword". A pattern which matches the entire word in which the search pattern is embedded would be something like

Code:

grep -ow '[A-Za-z]*word[A-Za-z]*' file

This says if there are any A-Z or a-z characters before or after, those are included in the pattern (and thus in what should be printed by -o). Then I guess you don't really need the -w option because the specified pattern already takes care of matching an entire word.

If you want "quote" marks, 'single' quotes, hyp-hens or abbr'viation apostrophes, you need to change the pattern slightly. Getting it perfectly right for all possible English words is not easy (and perhaps not even doable, depending on how you define "all", "possible", and "English").

cool thanks for the help =D