Re: regex question

[Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org>]

On Sun, Apr 13, 2008 at 10:00:42PM +1000, Alex Samad <alex@samad.com.au> was heard to say:
> On Sat, Apr 12, 2008 at 06:26:26PM -0700, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> > On Sun, Apr 13, 2008 at 09:37:02AM +1000, Alex Samad <alex@samad.com.au> was heard to say:
> > > this started out as a grep quetion
> > > 
> > > trying to look at a file with out the comments in it
> > > 
> > > i tried grep -v '^\s*;'  ; is the comment delimiter.
> > > 
> > > but this left me with lots of blank lines.
> > 
> >   Have you tried this?
> > 
> >     egrep -v '\s*(;|$)'
> Yes I did (thanks twice), but my question which arose from this was why
> this did not work 
> 
> perl -nle 'next if ( /^\s*;/);  print' sip.conf

  As you probably guessed from my mail, I don't speak perl; I was just
trying to solve the problem you said you started with. :-)  From your
comments above it sounded like you wanted to remove comments and *also*
blank lines.

> with a sample file of
> line 1
> ;line 2
>     ;line3
> line 4
> 
> 
> with the egrep and one -v '^\s*;' why do I end up with 
> line 1
> 
> 
> line 4

  I can't reproduce this.  You're saying that "egrep -v '^\s*;'" does
this?  Because I just get

    line 1
    line 4

  back, as I would expect.

  Could there be some odd characters in the input file that are
confusing grep?

  Daniel