Why can't i detect this file? - linux

Question

I have this file in a directory say test.php whose contents are below
< ? php $XZKsyG=’as’;
I want to pick up the file test.php with a search based on its content. So from the directory containing it I do:
grep 'php \$[a-zA-Z]*=.as.;'
However I get no result...what am I doing wrong?
Thanks

Answer 1

It works for me:
$ cat file
< ? php $XZKsyG=’as’;
$ grep 'php \$[a-zA-Z]*=.as.;' file
< ? php $XZKsyG=’as’;
Are you sure the contents of the file are exactly what you showed us?
Try cat -A file or od -c file to see whether the file really looks the way you think it does.
(Note that you don't need to escape the $ character; it's only a metacharacter at the end of a line. But escaping it should be ok.)
EDIT :
The characters around the as in your file are not ASCII apostrophes; they're Unicode RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK characters (0x2019). If the file is stored in UTF-8, each of them is represented as a 3-byte sequence. The grep command works for me because my locale settings "en_US.UTF-8" are such that a UTF-8 character is matched by . in a regexp, even if it has a multi-byte representation. I suspect your locale is such that it would be matched by ....
Probably the simplest solution is to edit the file to use ASCII apostrophes.
You might also want to play around with your locale settings. Try the grep command with $LANG set to "en_US.UTF-8".
What's the output of the locale command?

Answer 2

That works fine for me, though you may want to look into those "funny" single quotes you have around as:
pax$ cat testfile
< ? php $XZKsyG='as';
pax$ grep 'php \$[a-zA-Z]*=.as.;' testfile
< ? php $XZKsyG='as';
Failing that, there's some things you can look at. Some of these may sound silly but I'm really just checking all bases.
Are you sure the file contains only what you think it does? Executing od -xcb file will give you a hex dump of it for better checking.
Are you sure you're accessing the right file, in the right directory?
Have you done something silly like aliasing grep to be something else?
That's if you're looking for a file containing that string. If instead you're looking for a file named like that, you can use something like:
ls -1 | grep 'php \$[a-zA-Z]*=.as.;'
The ls -1 command gives you one file per line, and piping that through grep will filter out those not matching the pattern.
I suppose I should mention that I'm not really a big fan of file names with spaces in them, but I'm violently opposed to file names made up of PHP scripts :-)