grep 'RE botch' error

[John Sambrook]

In article <191 at clan.UUCP> naren at clan.UUCP (Narendra Mehta) writes:
>
>	grep '[' file
>
>	gives a 'RE botch' error on our VAX-750 running 4.2BSD.  If the fix
>has already been posted, could someone please mail me the diffs?  Thanks.

The message is correct.  On our system it is a little clearer:

	grep: RE error 49: [ ] imbalance.

The "[" character is used to introduce a range specification, as in
"[a-z]" to match a single character in the range of "a" to "z".  To
search for a literal '[' character you should escape it with a 
backslash, as in:

	grep '\[' file

Hope this helps.


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