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I need to use a regular expression in grep inside a bash script where I am trying to find the following occurrences inside a file:

foo, foo , foo) foo )

In the file, there are multiple occurrences of this word in other patterns that I want to ignore, like:

foo" foo. etc

Right now I am doing individual grep for each, but I want to use a single expression for all of these. I tried 'foo.,' and 'foo.)', but I still need 2 expressions and it (obviously) gives me matches with any character at the place of . which I don't want. What can I use?

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2 Answers 2

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grep -e 'foo \?[,)]' file_to_check

You probably want the word boundary answer though.

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Comments

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You don't need to try & match comma, space, (, ) etc.

Just use foo with word boundaries:

grep '\<foo\>' file

To specifically match those 4 strings:

egrep '\<foo ?[,)]' file
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7 Comments

Sorry, I think I phrased my question wrong. In a file, I want to find the four cases that I mentioned, and not just the word in the four cases !
@rgamber Please clarify: are there other instances of foo (not followed by ,, space, ( or )) that you would like to avoid matching?
Yes, there are. I'll update the question to say that.
It works fine when I run it directly in the terminal. When I use it in the bash script, that is when I get the error.
Can you post your BASH script so that I can investigate.
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