Thanks for replying. I finally found my problem: I recently updated to the latest version of cygwin and probably changed the choice for new line encoding by mistake; you get prompted to choose between unix/dos style during installation and I didn't remember what I had chosen originally. So apparently grep now viewed the existing pattern file provided with "-f" as a stream of bytes with no lines, and that never matched anything. When I re-wrote the pattern file with a different line return encoding, patterns again matched. Ah well.
-----Original Message----- From: Bob Proulx [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, May 23, 2008 8:55 PM To: John Pyrce Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: -f doesn't work? John Pyrce wrote: > I installed the latest version of cygwin, and now using patterns from a > file via "grep -f filename" doesn't work. It's hard to believe that > this would be broken, but I can't see anything that I'm doing wrong > either. Any thoughts? "Doesn't work" is a little vague. Can you give us an example? Then we could say if it works or not. To pre-emptively respond, -f is as the documentation says: -f FILE, --file=FILE Obtain patterns from FILE, one per line. The empty file con- tains zero patterns, and therefore matches nothing. Therefore an example (using GNU syntax) would be: $ echo oo > patternfile $ echo foo > datafile $ grep -f patternfile datafile foo You would need to adapt that for your Cygwin system but I assume you know it better than I do since I do not know it very well. Bob
