UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have a file that includes strings with special characters, eg
file1

Code:

line:[] 1 - special 1
line: = 4
line; -3

etc

How can I grep the lines of file1 from file2, line by line?

I used fgrep and egrep to grep a particular line and worked fine, but when I used:

Code:

cat file1|while read line;do egrep $line file2

then I get errors.
Is there a way to do this properly?

put double quotes around $line in grep

Code:

cat file1|while read line;do egrep "$line" file2; done

I can't figure out what you're trying to do.

If you are trying to look for fixed strings in a file when some of the strings you're looking for contain characters that are special in basic regular expressions (BREs) or extended regular expressions (EREs), then you need to use fgrep (or grep -F) and quote your arguments properly.

If you are trying to look for strings in a file matching BREs or EREs, then you need to use grep or egrep (or grep -E), respectively; quote your arguments proper; and modify the text in file1 to contain valid BREs or EREs, respectively. The text in the first line in file1 is not a valid BRE and is not a valid ERE.

SriniShoo already showed you how to properly quote your arguments and added the done needed to end your while loop. But, egrep won't work with your file1 contents. And, there is no reason to waste resources using cat to unnecessarily read and write the contents of file1 just so read can read the contents again.

Code:

while read line
do      fgrep "$line" file2
done < file1

or the single line equivalent:

Code:

while read line;do fgrep "$line" file2;done < file1