Hi,
I must be overlooking something, but I don't understand why this doesn't work. I'm trying to grep on a date, excluding all the lines starting with a dash:
testfile:
#2013-12-31
2013-12-31
code:
grep '^[^#]2013-12-31' testfile
I'm expecting to see just the second line '2013-12-31' but I don't get any results. grep -v is not an option btw.
[^#] means a single character that is not a hash-sign.
Why not use:
grep '^2013-12-31'
But perhaps you mean this:
grep '^[^#]*2013-12-31'
Elementary. [^#] will match one character which is not an octothorpe (or hash). So, what you are asking grep to match is one non-hash character (mandatory for the overall pattern to match) at the beginning of a line followed by 2013-12-31 .
Get it?
The problem is that the string doesn't always start with the date. It could be @2013-12-31 for example.
grep '^[^#]*2013-12-31'
seems to work by the way. Thanks 