UNIX® Shells by Example, Third Edition

3.5. egrep (Extended grep)

The main advantage of using egrep is that additional regular expression metacharacters (see Table 3.4) have been added to the set provided by grep. The \(\) and \{\}, however, are not allowed. (See GNU grep –E if using Linux.)

Table 3.4. egrep's Regular Expression Metacharacters

Metacharacter	Function	Example	What It Matches
^	Beginning-of-line anchor	'^love'	Matches all lines beginning with love.
$	End-of-line anchor	'love$'	Matches all lines ending with love.
.	Matches one character	'l..e'	Matches lines containing an l, followed by two characters, followed by an e.
*	Matches zero or more characters	'*love'	Matches lines with zero or more spaces of the preceding characters followed by the pattern love.
[ ]	Matches one ...