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From: The Blog User <blog AT yankeeboysoftware DOT com>
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Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 11:16:42 +0100 (BST)
Subject: grep weirdness - matching space character
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
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I am really struggling to understand what I am doing wrong here.

I have a log file with a line that looks like this:

++ 04:51:32 All 94 items succeeded

The binary data for that line is this:

2B 2B 20 30 34 3A 35 31 3A 33 32 20 41 6C 6C 20 39 34 20 69 74 65 6D 73 20
73 75 63 63 65 65 64 65 64 0A

using grep and tail (versions below) I am failing to match that line

$ tail -1 /path/to/file/the.log | grep -a "All \d*.items succeeded"

however if I insert 3 (why three?) dots (or a .*) between 'All' and '\d' I
get a match, what is happening ?

$ tail -1 /path/to/file/the.log | grep -a "All...\d*.items succeeded"


I tried '.*' before I looked at the binary values, and got a match, then I
reverted to '...'  by trial and error.
This seems wrong to me, since - from my knowledge of regex's - that is
saying there must be three characters between the 'All' and the first
digit, yet I can see there is only a single space character.

VERSION Information
$ uname -a
CYGWIN_NT-5.1 gbws-00027514 1.5.21(0.156/4/2) 2006-07-30 14:21 i686 Cygwin

$ bash --version
GNU bash, version 3.1.17(6)-release (i686-pc-cygwin)

$ grep --version
grep (GNU grep) 2.5.1

$ tail --version
tail (GNU coreutils) 5.97

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