[SOLVED] help with grep / egrep wildcard search

[leo7889]

searching a file with wildcard characters in the search criteria

example: searching a property file abc.txt for getting a result string "heartbeat"

file contents as below:
heartbeat
hardbeat
nobeet
none


command executed is:

heart*
he*beat
*beat

all the above should print the result as heartbeat

Assuming many files like abc.txt are in the folder, the final command/shellscript should print matching results from all the files.

[tpl]

how about something like this:

cd /folder
grep heartbeat *

?

[leo7889]

how about something like this:

cd /folder
grep heartbeat *

?

thanks, but user do not know full string, so he will try something like hea*et.

grep hea*et is not fetching heartbeat, which is my problem.

[lugoteehalt]

thanks, but user do not know full string, so he will try something like hea*et.

grep hea*et is not fetching heartbeat, which is my problem.

Should think

$ egrep "hea.*et"

would find it. Not an expert, the . may not be necessary. You could also have

$ egrep "^hea.*et$

if you knew it was the only word on the line. Using bot ^ and $ is overkill (copyright Pentagon).

It is highly instructive to make it colour what it has found: --colour ??

[lomcevak]

grep hea*et is not fetching heartbeat, which is my problem.

The * searches for the preceeding character, in this case 'a', zero or more times. So strings like the following would match:

heet
heaet
heaaet

Since you want any character zero or more times precede the '*' with the metacharacter '.'. So you should use:

hea.*et

[leo7889]

lugoteehalt and lomcevak

Thanks for your answers and explanation. Will try this and get back to you.

[leo7889]

I really appreciate your time answering this issue, it works like a charm.

I have another small issue left out, that is when I search for the search string if the result line has a \ at the end of line, I am not getting the text on the next line, which I need to show, is that possible?

[leo7889]

Found it from a friend.

grep -A1 "heart.*at" prop.txt


Result:
----------
heartbeat \
more beats