Szlovencsak Attila wrote:
If I want to grep out all lines with a single '^' character as a word, I
say
grep '\b\^\b' /tmp/test
but it does not give back the first two lines of the file, as expected.
This is working as intended. Grep's definition of a "word" for these purposes
is not what you think it is. You can find the definition in the manual, in the
description of "-w":
-w, --word-regexp
Select only those lines containing matches that form whole
words. The test is that the matching substring must either be
at the beginning of the line, or preceded by a non-word con‐
stituent character. Similarly, it must be either at the end of
the line or followed by a non-word constituent character. Word-
constituent characters are letters, digits, and the underscore.
- Julian
