afoiani@nmsu.edu (Anthony "Tkil" Foiani) (01/26/91)
I've a question for unix gurus. I was creating a mail digest, and was using 79 '=' signs as delimiters. I then tried to use egrep to knock it apart, with the command % egrep '^=\{79\}$' my-mail-digest which failed pretty violently to find any separaters. I eventually got around to trying % grep '^=\{79\}$' my-mail-digest which worked as expected. The real 'question' then, is why did egrep fail while grep works? TiA, Tony -- Tony Foiani a.k.a. Tkil (afoiani@nmsu.edu) or (mcsajf@nmsuvm1.bitnet) Supporting: Unix / DOS / VMS / Macintosh / "What's this?" ObQuote: "Lucretia, my reflection, dance the ghost with me..." - Sisters Of Mercy
barmar@think.com (Barry Margolin) (01/26/91)
In article <AFOIANI.91Jan25105849@dante.nmsu.edu> afoiani@nmsu.edu (Anthony "Tkil" Foiani) writes: >The real 'question' then, is why did egrep fail while grep works? According to my manual (SunOS 4.0.3): egrep accepts regular expressions of the same sort grep does, except for \(, \), \n, \<, \>, \{, and \}, ... -- Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp. barmar@think.com {uunet,harvard}!think!barmar