grep for text with wild card in between

Question

I would like to grep something like ==> *.sh <==. But it doesn't work, I can grep everything up to .sh <== but not get the wild card to work.

What's the trick here?

so, the '==> *.sh <==' is **all** in the file? You need to use a regular expression. — pavium, May 06 '11 at 02:47

score 37 · Accepted Answer · answered May 06 '11 at 02:45

37

You need to grep for something like "==> .*\.sh <=="

The .* part matches any character for any length, the \. part matches a dot.

answered May 06 '11 at 02:45

sayap

4

(By way of explanation, "*.sh" is a filename glob pattern, which is a completely different notation for matching than the regular expressions expected by grep. In regular expressions, * means 0 or more repetitions of the previous expression, which in your case was a space. A dot means any character at all. So, " *.sh" could match " Xsh" but never "file.sh". Google regular expresions for details / examples etc.) – Tony Delroy May 06 '11 at 04:12
2

@TonyD great comment but use `backquote`s to delimit code or terminology so readers won't have to think was the double quote/quote a part of the command or not – Sergey Telshevsky Mar 22 '13 at 13:27

1 Answers1