CODEWITHSUNDEEP
grep
brunoais
brunoais

Reputation: 6846

grep find lines that contains " \t"

I was requested to make a shell script to check for simple mistakes in files. I wanted to find, for each line if

(regex:) "[ ]\t" ever happens.

The problem is that grep is ignoring the \ and is taking "t" as a literal. I also tried writting the characters themselves in a file and asking grep to read it but it didn't work. Is there a way to find for the regex " \t" in files using any of the usual linux tools (like grep)?

I already tried:

grep -E --ignore-case --line-number --with-filename --file="b" file

(b contains: " ") and also:

grep -E --ignore-case --line-number --with-filename --regexp=" [\t]" file

Upvotes: 10

Views: 18170

Answers (2)

ДМИТРИЙ МАЛИКОВ
ДМИТРИЙ МАЛИКОВ

Reputation: 21990

You can use perl regex with --perl-regex option like

 grep --perl-regex "\t"

Upvotes: 7

kev
kev

Reputation: 161884

You can use C-style string $'...'

grep $'\t' file.txt

Or sed:

sed -n '/\t/p' file.txt

Upvotes: 18

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