UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have a question about grep command in Unix. I want to search for a particular world from a file that world should be in the begining of the line and exactly match.
e.g.
say I have a file called find.txt
REM 1 2 3 4
REM 5 6 7 8
REMARK 1 2 3 4
1 2 3 REM 4

The result should print the above two lines only i.e.
REM 1 2 3 4
REM 5 6 7 8


What I want is similar to this command but this does not work.

grep -iw "^REM"

Any idea how to do this.

Thanks for your time.

Sanjay

try ...

cat your_file | grep "^REM "

...note the space after the M in the quotes.
The "-i" does a case insensitive match.

Thanks for your reply. But this will not work if you have a tab character after REM. Here you are assuming that you have a single blank space but I could have a blank space or a tab charcter.

Thanks
Sanjay

This command will look for the string at the beginning of a line with either a space or a TAB character directly following it

grep -ie "^REM " -ie "^REM " find.txt

The "i" makes it not case sensitive, and the "e" is kind of like saying "search for this or this". You can remove the "i" to make the match exact. And if you know what you're trying to filter out, you can use the "v" option:

grep "^REM" find.txt | grep -v "^REMARK"

Also note that you may have some problems in the first example trying to get the TAB to show up. If you have "tab-completion" turned on in the shell, you'll have to type a ctrl-V, then TAB.

Hope one of those will work for you.

Thanks. Good suggestion and it works.

/usr/xpg4/bin/grep -ie "^REM " -ie "^REM " a.sql

Is it possible to include \t as a tab charcter. I have tried but it does not work. see the example below.
Can you tell me why it does not works.

/usr/xpg4/bin/grep -ie "^REM " -ie "^REM\t" a.sql


Thanks for your help.

Sanjay