CODEWITHSUNDEEP
grep
Andrew-Dufresne
Andrew-Dufresne

Reputation: 5624

How to make grep stop at first match on a line?

Well, I have a file test.txt

#test.txt
odsdsdoddf112 test1_for_grep
dad23392eeedJ test2 for grep
Hello World test
garbage

I want to extract strings which have got a space after them. I used following expression and it worked

grep -o  [[:alnum:]]*.[[:blank:]]  test.txt

Its output is 

odsdsdoddf112
dad23392eeedJ 
test2 
for    
Hello 
World

But problem is grep prints all the strings that have got space after them, where as I want it to stop after first match on a line and then proceed to second line.

Which expression should I use here, in order to make it stop after first match and move to next line?

This problem may be solved with gawk or some other tool, but I will appreciate a solution which uses grep only.

Edit I using GNU grep 2.5.1 on a Linux system, if that is relevant.

Edit

With the help of the answers given below, I tried my luck with 

grep  -o   ^[[:alnum:]]*  test.txt
grep  -Eo  ^[[:alnum:]]+  test.txt

and both gave me correct answers.

Now what surprises me is that I tried using 

grep -Eo "^[[:alnum:]]+[[:blank:]]" test.txt

as suggested here but didn't get the correct answer. Here is the output on my terminal

odsdsdoddf112
dad23392eeedJ 
test2 
for    
Hello 
World

But comments from RichieHindle and Adrian Pronk, shows that they got correct output on their systems. Anyone with some idea that why I too am not getting the same result on my system. Any idea? Any help will be appreciated.

Edit

Well, it seems that grep 2.5.1 has some bug because of which my output wasn't correct. I installed grep 2.5.4, now it is working correctly. Please see this link for details.

Upvotes: 10

Views: 24891

Answers (4)

Robert Tupelo-Schneck
Robert Tupelo-Schneck

Reputation: 10543

As the questioner discovered, this is a bug in versions of GNU grep prior to 2.5.3. The bug allows a caret to match after the end of a previous match, not just at beginning of line.

This bug is still present in other versions of grep, for instance in Mac OS X 10.9.4.

There isn't a universal workaround, but in the some examples, like non-spaces followed by a space, you can often get the desired behavior by leaving off the delimiter. That is, search for '[^ ]*' rather than '[^ ]* '.

Upvotes: 2

Onlyjob
Onlyjob

Reputation: 5888

If we want to extract all meaningful input before garbage and actually stop on first match then -B NUM, --before-context=NUM option may be useful to "print NUM lines of leading context before matching lines".

Example:

grep --before-context=999999 "Hello World test"

Upvotes: 0

RichieHindle
RichieHindle

Reputation: 281875

If you're sure you have no leading whitespace, add a ^ to match only at the start of a line, and change the * to a + to match only when you have one or more alphanumeric characters. (That means adding -E to use extended regular expressions).

grep -Eo "^[[:alnum:]]+[[:blank:]]" test.txt

(I also removed the . from the middle; I'm not sure what that was doing there?)

Upvotes: 8

BryanH
BryanH

Reputation: 6062

grep -oe "^[^ ]* " test.txt

Upvotes: 1

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