grep for one pattern but not for another pattern

Question

A purely grep question.

A file contains commented out strings. For example:

abc
abc1
# def3
ghi5
qwe

I want to get all strings with a number in it, but not if this string prepended with "#". So in this example we should see

abc1
ghi5

The double grep solves the problem:

grep -vE "^#" file.txt | grep -E "[0-9]"

Now the question: Is there a way to do that in one run of grep?

Jeff Schaller · Accepted Answer · 2020-08-07 17:09:59Z

1

If you can be sure that the first character is a letter (you did not check for that either):

grep '^[^#].*[0-9]' file.txt

Jeff Schaller♦

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answered Aug 7, 2020 at 16:59

Hauke Laging

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1 Answer 1