I have one file with the following data. I am using egrep as the command
which is used for extended regular expression pattern
test
best
+see
done++
feett
ttesingt
I want the output as below
best
+see
done++
vino+
I am using the below command for the output
egrep 't?' filename.
We know that the meaning of ? is zero or one occurrence of previous
character. So in my case t is optional if it present it has only one t but i
am getting all lines as output.
Please let me know how to achieve the required output.
? means: The preceding item is optional and matched at most once.
In your question, egrep 't?' filename means, you are considering it as optional right.
Meanwhile egrep '?' filename (here t is zero occurrence), so it will print total file output.
Example : If you give egrep 'tt?' filename, it means here first character is 't' and next chracter 't?' is optional zero occurrence. So the output will be
egrep 't' filename
In short, egrep 't?' filename essentially means "find me a 't' character, but if it's absent, that's OK too".
Let's start with egrep 't', this asks to find one t character. It doesn't say only one character, so it will match "at", "att", "attt" and so on.
Then you add "?" to it -- egrep 't?', making "t" optional, now it matches "a", "at", "att", "abc", "xyz" and basically any other string you can imagine.
In case of one-character searches the "?" modifier doesn't really make any sense, only when there's more to find, like for example egrep 'ab?c' that matches "abc", "acd", but not "abb".
How to make your example work?
A simple way will be just to chain two egreps together:
egrep t filename | egrep -v tt
First egrep gives you only lines containing at least one t, the second one will throw away all lines with two (or more) t characters together.
More complex solution using regexp will look like this:
egrep '^((^|[^t]+)t($|[^t]+))+$' filename
I would personally prefer the first one :)
Related
I want to extract the first instance of a string per line in linux. I am currently trying grep but it yields all the instances per line. Below I want the strings (numbers and letters) after "tn="...but only the first set per line. The actual characters could be any combination of numbers or letters. And there is a space after them. There is also a space before the tn=
Given the following file:
hello my name is dog tn=12g3 fun 23k3 hello tn=1d3i9 cheese 234kd dks2 tn=6k4k ksk
1263 chairs are good tn=k38493kd cars run vroom it95958 tn=k22djd fair gold tn=293838 tounge
Desired output:
12g3
k38493
Here's one way you can do it if you have GNU grep, which (mostly) supports Perl Compatible Regular Expressions with -P. Also, the non-standard switch -o is used to only print the part matching the pattern, rather than the whole line:
grep -Po '^.*?tn=\K\S+' file
The pattern matches the start of the line ^, followed by any characters .*?, where the ? makes the match non-greedy. After the first match of tn=, \K "kills" the previous part so you're only left with the bit you're interested in: one or more non-space characters \S+.
As in Ed's answer, you may wish to add a space before tn to avoid accidentally matching something like footn=.... You might also prefer to use something like \w to match "word" characters (equivalent to [[:alnum:]_]).
Just split the input in tn=-separators and pick the second one. Then, split again to get everything up to the first space:
$ awk -F"tn=" '{split($2,a, " "); print a[1]}' file
12g3
k38493kd
$ awk 'match($0,/ tn=[[:alnum:]]+/) {print substr($0,RSTART+4,RLENGTH-4)}' file
12g3
k38493kd
I want to find the word 'on' as a prefix or suffix of a string, but not where it is in the middle.
As an example,
I have a text which has words like 'on', 'one', 'cron', 'stone'. I want to find lines which contains exact word 'on' and also words like 'one' and 'cron', but it should not match stone.
I'm surprised nobody has proposed the simple, obvious
grep -E '\<on|on\>' files ...
The metacharacter sequences \< and \> match a left and right word boundary, respectively. I believe it should be portable to any modern platform (though I would be unsurprised if Solaris, HP-UX, or AIX required some tweaks in order to get it to work).
If you've got GNU grep or BSD grep, then it is relatively straight-forward:
grep -E '\b(on[[:alpha:]]*|[[:alpha:]]*on)\b'
This looks for a word boundary followed by 'on' and zero or more alphabetic characters, or for zero or more alphabetic characters followed by 'on', followed by a word boundary.
For example, given the data:
on line should be selected
cron line should be selected
stone line should not be selected
station wagon
onwards, ever onwards.
on24 is not selected
24on is not selected
Example run:
$ grep -E '\b(on[[:alpha:]]*|[[:alpha:]]*on)\b' data
on line should be selected
cron line should be selected
station wagon
onwards, ever onwards.
$
With a strict POSIX-compatible grep, you would have to work a lot harder, if it can be done at all.
Note that this solution is assuming that mixed digits and letters are not a 'word' in this context (so neither on24 nor 24on should be selected). If you don't mind digits appearing as part of a word starting or ending 'on', then you can use either of two other answers:
triplee's answer
alfasin's answer
or you can hack this one into shape so it does what one of theirs does.
You can use egrep (regex) in order to catch the exact phrases: by using \b (word boundary) you can make sure to not catch anything else other than the required 3 words:
egrep -e '\b(on|one|cron)\b' <filename>
UPDATE:
Since the question was edited & clarified that the OP is looking to have on "as a prefix or suffix of a string":
egrep -e '\bon|on\b' <filename>
If you're just going 'all out' and searching for anything with the substring 'on' in it (leaving out 'stone')...
grep '[A-Za-z]on[A-Za-z]' <your file name> | grep -v 'stone'
piping into the grep command again will hide any of the results that were 'stone'
I'm having a hard time getting a grasp of using grep for a class i am in was hoping someone could help guide me in this assignment. The Assignment is as follows.
Using grep print all 5 letter lower case words from the linux dictionary that have a single letter duplicated one time (aabbe or ababe not valid because both a and b are in the word twice). Next to that print the duplicated letter followed buy the non-duplicated letters in alphabetically ascending order.
The Teacher noted that we will need to use several (6) grep statements (piping the results to the next grep) and a sed statement (String Editor) to reformat the final set of words, then pipe them into a read loop where you tear apart the three non-dup letters and sort them.
Sample Output:
aback a bck
abaft a bft
abase a bes
abash a bhs
abask a bks
abate a bet
I haven't figured out how to do more then printing 5 character words,
grep "^.....$" /usr/share/dict/words |
Didn't check it thoroughly, but this might work
tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | egrep -x '[a-z]{5}' | sed -r 's/^(.*)(.)(.*)\2(.*)$/\2 \1\3\4/' | grep " " | egrep -v "(.).*\1"
But do your way because someone might see it here.
All in one sed
sed -n '
# filter 5 letter word
/[a-zA-Z]\{5\}/ {
# lower letters
y/ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ/abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxya/
# filter non single double letter
/\(.\).*\1/ !b
/\(.\).*\(.\).*\1.*\1/ b
/\(.\).*\(.\).*\1.*\2/ b
/\(.\).*\(.\).*\2.*\1/ b
# extract peer and single
s/\(.\)*\(.\)\(.*\)\2\(.*\)/a & \2:\1\3\4/
# sort singles
:sort
s/:\([^a]*\)a\(.*\)$/:\1\2a/
y/abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz/zabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxy/
/^a/ !b sort
# clean and print
s/..//
s/:/ /p
}' YourFile
posix sed so --posix on GNU sed
The first bit, obviously, is to use grep to get it down to just the words that have a single duplication in. I will give you some clues on how to do that.
The key is to use backreferences, which allow you to specify that something that matched a previous expression should appear again. So if you write
grep -E "^(.)...\1...\1$"
then you'll get all the words that have the starting letter reappearing in fifth and ninth positions. The point of the brackets is to allow you to refer later to whatever matched the thing in brackets; you do that with a \1 (to match the thing in the first lot of brackets).
You want to say that there should be a duplicate anywhere in the word, which is slightly more complicated, but not much. You want a character in brackets, then any number of characters, then the repeated character (with no ^ or $ specified).
That will also include ones where there are two or more duplicates, so the next stage is to filter them out. You can do that by a grep -v invocation. Once you've got your list of 5-character words that have at least one duplicate, pipe them through a grep -v call that strips out anything with two (or more) duplicates in. That'll have a (.), and another (.), and a \1, and a \2, and these might appear in several different orders.
You'll also need to strip out anything that has a (.) and a \1 and another \1, since that will have a letter with three occurrences.
That should be enough to get you started, at any rate.
Your next step should be to find the 5-letter words containing a duplicate letter. To do that, you will need to use back-references. Example:
grep "[a-z]*\([a-z]\)[a-z]*\$1[a-z]*"
The $1 picks up the contents of the first parenthesized group and expects to match that group again. In this case, it matches a single letter. See: http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2011/01/advanced-regular-expressions-in-grep-command-with-10-examples--part-ii/ for more description of this capability.
You will next need to filter out those cases that have either a letter repeated 3 times or a word with 2 letters repeated. You will need to use the same sort of back-reference trick, but you can use grep -v to filter the results.
sed can be used for the final display. Grep will merely allow you to construct the correct lines to consider.
Note that the dictionary contains capital letters and also non-letter characters, plus that strange characters used in Southern Europe. say "รจ".
If you want to distinguish "A" and "a", it's automatic, on the other hand if "A" and "a" are the same letter, in ALL grep invocations you must use the -i option, to instruct grep to ignore case.
Next, you always want to pass the -E option, to avoid the so called backslashitis gravis in the regexp that you want to pass to grep.
Further, if you want to exclude the lines matching a regexp from the output, the correct option is -v.
Eventually, if you want to specify many different regexes to a single grep invocation, this is the way (just an example btw)
grep -E -i -v -e 'regexp_1' -e 'regexp_2' ... -e 'regexp_n'
The preliminaries are after us, let's look forward, use the answer from chiastic-security as a reference to understand the procedings
There are only these possibilities to find a duplicate in a 5 character string
(.)\1
(.).\1
(.)..\1
(.)...\1
grep -E -i -e 'regexp_1' ...
Now you have all the doubles, but this doesn't exclude triples etc that are identified by the following patterns (Edit added a cople of additional matching triples patterns)
(.)\1\1
(.).\1\1
(.)\1.\1
(.)..\1\1
(.).\1.\1
(.)\1\1\1
(.).\1\1\1
(.)\1\1\1\1\
you want to exclude these patterns, so grep -E -i -v -e 'regexp_1' ...
at his point, you have a list of words with at least a couple of the same character, and no triples, etc and you want to drop double doubles, these are the regexes that match double doubles
(.)(.)\1\2
(.)(.)\2\1
(.).(.)\1\2
(.).(.)\2\1
(.)(.).\1\2
(.)(.).\2\1
(.)(.)\1.\2
(.)(.)\2.\1
and you want to exclude the lines with these patterns, so its grep -E -i -v ...
A final hint, to play with my answer copy a few hundred lines of the dictionary in your working directory, head -n 3000 /usr/share/dict/words | tail -n 300 > ./300words so that you can really understand what you're doing, avoiding to be overwhelmed by the volume of the output.
And yes, this is not a complete answer, but it is maybe too much, isn't it?
I'm trying to write a grep (or egrep) command that will find and print any lines in "words.txt" which contain the same lower-case letter three times in a row. The three occurrences of the letter may appear consecutively (as in "mooo") or separated by one or more spaces (as in "x x x") but not separated by any other characters.
words.txt contains:
The monster said "grrr"!
He lived in an igloo only in the winter.
He looked like an aardvark.
Here's what I think the command should look like:
grep -E '\b[^ ]*[[:alpha:]]{3}[^ ]*\b' 'words.txt'
Although I know this is wrong, but I don't know enough of the syntax to figure it out. Using grep, could someone please help me?
Does this work for you?
grep '\([[:lower:]]\) *\1 *\1'
It takes a lowercase character [[:lower:]] and remembers it \( ... \). It than tries to match any number of spaces _* (0 included), the rememberd character \1, any number of spaces, the remembered character. And that's it.
You can try running it with --color=auto to see what parts of the input it matched.
Try this. Note that this will not match "mooo", as the word boundary (\b) occurs before the "m".
grep -E '\b([[:alpha:]]) *\1 *\1 *\b' words.txt
[:alpha:] is an expression of a character class. To use as a regex charset, it needs the extra brackets. You may have already known this, as it looks like you started to do it, but left the open bracket unclosed.
I'm trying to find a way to delete any lines that contain characters other than what I specify. For example if I specify the characters a,e,i,o,u,r,s,t and I have a list of words
rat
tar
set
meow
Then "meow" should be deleted from the list because it contains the letters "m" and "w", which I haven't okayed. Any ideas?
Alternatively you can do this:
$ grep -v '[^aeiourst]' file.txt
rat
tar
set
The pattern matches lines that contain any caracter not specified in the list. This is clearly explained in the grep manual page:
A bracket expression is a list of characters enclosed by [ and ]. It matches any single character in that list; if the first character of the list is the caret ^ then it matches any character not in the list. For example, the regular expression [0123456789] matches any single digit.
In addition to this, since what you want is to remove the lines that match that pattern the -v/--invert-match option is used. This is also well explained in the grep manual page:
-v, --invert-match
Invert the sense of matching, to select non-matching lines. (-v is specified by POSIX.)
This should do it for you. It has the letters you specified in a set, enclosed by []. * denotes that they can occur any number of times. ^ denotes the line must start with one of those letters, and $ denotes it must end with it as well.
grep '^[aeiourst]*$' file.txt