Shell Programming and Scripting

It sounds like you are trying to force egrep to behave like fgrep, so perhaps use fgrep instead?

From man fgrep...

Thanks, Ygor. I do need the functionality that egrep has, such as '|' (search either) and '.*' (any number of characters/spaces), neither of which fgrep provides. But I also need to 'turn off' some of this functionality for common search strings that contain parenthesis and periods.

After my previous post, I realized that in escaping the period, I also disabled the ability to use '.*' in the search. So my 'final product' wasn't so final...here's what I have now, which allows using '.*', but escapes the period if it precedes a number between 0 and 255.

search_arg=`echo "$*" | tr -s ' ' | sed 's/\([()]\)/\\\\\1/g' | sed 's/\(\.[0-255]\)/\\\\\1/g'`

How about:
search_arg=`echo "$*" | tr -s ' ' | sed 's/\([()]\)/\\\\\1/g;s/\(\.[0-255]\)/\\\\\1/g'`
which saves a sed process.


Or...

search_arg=`echo "$*" | sed 's/ */ /g;s/\([()]\)/\\\\\1/g;s/\(\.[0-255]\)/\\\\\1/g'`

which eliminates the tr process too.

I'm all for more efficiency, thanks Perderabo!

I've run into a glitch...

While testing my script, I found that many numbers are not getting 'backslashed'! Here's the line in the script that does the backslashing for .0 through .255:

search_arg=`echo "$*" | sed 's/ */ /g;s/\([()]\)/\\\\\1/g;s/\(\.[0-255]\)/\\\\\1/g'`

I put this in a FOR loop and echo'd the results, and here are the numbers that did not get a backslash:
.3
.4
.6
.7
.8
.9
.30
.31
.32
.33
.34
.35
.36
.37
.38
.39
.40
.41
.42
.43
.44
.45
.46
.47
.48
.49
.60 through .99
All other numbers up to .255 received the appropriate backslash.

Any ideas on what's causing this?

[0-255]

is a character in the range 0 through 2 or a 5 or a 5.

Again, thanks for the help.

Here's the correct form:
search_arg=`echo "$*" | tr -s ' ' | sed 's/\([()]\)/\\\\\1/g;s/\(\.[0-9]\{1\}\)/\\\\\1/g'`