CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexbashawk
mike
mike

Reputation: 220

Checking upper case in AWK with range [A-Z] not working

I have the following bash script:

cat test | awk '/^[A-Z]/ {print NF}'

Let's assume the content of test is the following:

This one yes
this one no
This one yes
this one no

In principle it should print the number of fields of first and third line, since I'm looking for lines beginning with a character in upper case. However, the result is that number of fields of all the lines in the file is printed. If I try with grep, with the same regular expression, the result is what I expect.

In addition, if instead of putting [A-Z], I write [[:upper:]] the script works flawlessly.

My question is: why in the first case it does not work?

Upvotes: 4

Views: 2404

Answers (1)

Ed Morton
Ed Morton

Reputation: 203684

It's your locale setting. Google locale. Set LC_ALL=C to get a common one but using character classes is the right approach.

Upvotes: 5

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