bash regular expressions

[Ralph W. Reid]

Your search strings are not in quotes, and are therefore interpreted
by the shell directly instead of by `grep`..  For this particular set
of cases, either single or double quotes will work.  For differences
in the single and double quotes which can make a difference in other
cases, see the man page for the shell you are using (most likely
`bash).  For the man page for `bash, enter the following command at
your system prompt:

man bash

Note that as I said before, the `bash` man page is somewhat lengthy,
but there is a lot of good stuff in there.  Here is an example of one
command which solves one of your problems--I leave the other problem
for you to figure out as an exercise:

grep -c "\." ./testfile.txt

HTH, and keep on learnin' :) .

On Mon, Apr 04, 2005 at 10:22:11AM -0700, Ned wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I wrote a bash script and all but the two commands below were marked wrong, so I need to correct them. Hope you don't mind pointing out my mistakes:
> 1. needs to output how many lines are there with a . (period) in them. I used the escape char \ before the period, but it apparently didn't work.
> 
> echo Output the number of lines that have a \"\.\" \(period\):
> grep -c \. ./test.file
> 
> 2. this one needs to output the number of lines containing the string '/*':
> 
> echo Output the number of lines that have the string \"'/'\*\":
> grep -c /\* ./test.file
> 
> 
> Thanks a lot in advance!
> Ned
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-- 
Ralph.  N6BNO.  Wisdom comes from central processing, not from I/O.
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