5

I understand that

'*' : The preceding item will be matched zero or more times.
'?' : The preceding item is optional and will be matched, at most, once.
'+' : The preceding item will be matched one or more items

Can anyone give me an example of when there would be a difference while using grep? I was using egrep, but I tried to check if I could generate different outputs for these operators.

posixKing
  • 1,143

1 Answers1

13

make an example? try it out?

$ cat greppy
grp
grep
greep

zero or more e here

$ egrep 'gre*p' greppy
grp
grep
greep

zero or one e here

$ egrep 'gre?p' greppy
grp
grep

one or more e here

$ egrep 'gre+p' greppy
grep
greep
Zanna
  • 72,312