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Newsgroups: comp.sys.3b1
Subject: Re: egrep on the 3b1 is weird!
Message-ID: <GUEST.91Mar22115440@geech.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 22 Mar 91 16:54:40 GMT
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In-reply-to: kak@hico2.UUCP's message of 21 Mar 91 23:04:03 GMT

Since without any kind of quoting or special chars a regular
expression is 1 character:
	egrep 'foo|bar'
matches lines containing fooar and fobar.  That's why you need to use
parentheses.  You have to read the manual page for ed(1) to get the
rest of the story on regular expressions.  To quote the grep man page:
"Egrep accepts regular expressions as in ed(1), except..."

Daniel Guilderson
ryan@cs.umb.edu