grep -f

[jody]

Hi
Does any body know how to use the -f option of grep?
As far as i've understood from the man page each line is treated as a pattern

-f FILE, --file=FILE
Obtain patterns from FILE, one per line. The empty file contains zero patterns, and therefore
matches nothing.

For trivial searches i get it working
Example:

[jody ~]$ cat sample.txt 
line one 
second line
another one
number four
[jody ~]$ cat pat.txt 
one
line
[jody ~]$ grep -f pat.txt sample.txt 
line one 
second line
another one

This result is as expected. But when i want to use regular expressions in the pattern file it does not seem to work, so probably i am doing it wrong.
Example:

[jody~]$ cat sample2.txt 
 5  6   a 
  55 6 b
 5 665e c
 4  67u d
 1 1 e 
 1 2 f
 5    4 g
 15  6 h
 5   62 i
 5 6 j
 7 82 k

[jody ~]$ grep -e "^ *5 *6 * " sample2.txt 
 5  6   a 
 5 6 j

But if i put this pattern string into a file, it doesn't work.
If i use it as above, all lines are returned, if i add a '-e', no lines are returned:

[jody ~]$ cat pat2.txt 
"^ *5 *6 " 

[jody ~]$ grep -f pat2.txt  sample2.txt 
 5  6   a 
  55 6 b
 5 665e c
 4  67u d
 1 1 e 
 1 2 f
 5    4 g
 15  6 h
 5   62 i
 5 6 j
 7 82 k

[jody ~]$ grep -e -f pat2.txt  sample2.txt 
[jody ~]$

I also tried the '-e' inside the pattern file, but thenagain all lines are returned.

Does anybody know how to use this correctly?
Can one also specify to not return lines matching the pattern in the pattern file (like '-v')?

I need this because i have to filter out lines matching
different patterns from a large file.

Thank You
Jody

[Rubberman]

Did you try leaving the double-quotes out of pat2.txt? I think it adds those to the pattern so since your sample2.txt file has no double-quotes in it, the pattern doesn't match.

[jody]

Thank you, rubberman, that did it!
I can also exclude the patterns in pat2.txt by doing

grep -v pat2.txt sample2.txt

Of course no quotes mean the pattern is a bit hard to
read if there are spaces at the end, but that is only a minor thing.

Thanks
Jody