I'm new to egrep. What pattern could I use to find all lines that match this pattern: <beginning of line><any amount of whitespace>sub<space>. I want it to return the entire line.
(I'm trying to generate a list of all Perl sub definitions in a list of Perl modules.)
Thanks for your help!
First, it's suggested to use grep -E instead of egrep, since it's more portable.
Second, pretty much the same pattern that you would use in Perl.
Portability isn't a concern to me since I'm not going to deploy this command.
What pattern would I use in Perl then?
can you post sample input you want to grep
I have a collection of Perl code files which define several subs. Most appear to have some whitespace (spaces or tabs) before the first line of the sub definition:
sub subname {
I want to use egrep (or grep -E) to find all these, because simple grep for the word sub returns lots of lines I don't want to see (like Perl comments and things in quotes).
Examples of lines I don't want to see:
# sub subname {
print "This sub does something"
Portability doesn't have anything to do with deployment IMO, but should be looked after by the developer.
And the pattern you're looking for is
^[[:space:]]*sub[[:space:]]+ #grep -E
^\s*sub\s+ #perl
say you don't want lines with "# sub subname " and want only "sub subname {" to be listed.
grep -v "# sub subname" .perl | grep -h "sub subname {"
grep -v "# sub subname" ./ | grep -h "sub subname {"
Ah there's the answer I was looking for. Here's the command I used to make a list of all subs defined in all files, for anyone who's interested:
grep -e ^[[:space:]]*sub[[:space:]] * > sublist.txt
As far as Amit's post goes, his commands could have been condensed to the following, and would not have worked regardless because I wasn't searching for the exact string "subname." (I thought that would have been obvious.)
grep "sub subname {" * | grep -v "#"