On 11/09/2010 12:26 PM, Bob McGowan wrote: > On 11/09/2010 06:00 AM, Jochen Schulz wrote: ... >> What was your exact command line? Did you quote the regular expression? >> My guess is that the shell interpreted the '*' character for you and you >> ended up with a command line like this: >> >> $ grep [_a-zA-Z][_a-zA-Z0-9]file1 file2 file3 ... > The shell will expand the above into space separated values, based on > matches to the glob pattern. The first match will become the pattern > used by grep, searched for in the remaining file names. Try this: > > echo grep [_a-zA-Z][_a-zA-Z0-9]* > > to see what the shell does in any particular case. Yeah. I feel really silly now. I was so focused on getting the regular expression right that I completely forgot to consider the shell interpreting things on my behalf. Couldn't see the forest because of the tree in my way I guess. Thanks! I do appreciate it.
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