egrep question

I want to egrep for certain fields which are not existing in the current log files and am getting errors for that...

egrep "'^20090220.14'|'^20090220.15'|'^20090220.16'|'^20090220.17'|'^20090220.18'"

Some of the times are in future and logs don't have those entries and I get errors for them ... what should I do?

Thanks,
Allan

Take out the single quotes. The double-quotes make sure that the | don't get treated as a pipe character by the shell. The single-quotes just confuse egrep.

Also, it might be better to do:

egrep "^(200090220.14|20090220.15|20090220.16)"