[WBEL-users] grep help

[Benjamin J. Weiss]

On Tue, 14 Dec 2004, William Hooper wrote:

> 
> Timothy Nash said:
> [snip]
> > It works for me on my linux box as well.  A friend of mine asked me this
> > question - not sure exactly what he's trying to do.  I just found out he's
> > using Solaris.  Anyone know why Solaris treats periods differently than
> > Linux.
> 
> Nope, but...
> 
> > When he issues any of the following commands:
> >
> >
> > grep -w "hostname" hosts
> > grep -w 'hostname' hosts
> > grep -w hostname hosts
> 
> These commands are correct to return both lines (and in the original
> example, all 4 lines).  The command that works is:
> 
> grep hostname$ hosts
> 
> This works because the "$" is a metacharacter that means "at the end of a
> line".  Perhaps the Solaris grep is a different version?


This works if there's no whitespace after the hostname.  If he's 
accidentally put in tabs or spaces after the line, then the following will 
still pick it up:

grep -w hostname[[:blank:]]*$ hosts

Ben