Re: [gentoo-user] Need help with a regex

[Robin Atwood]

On Saturday 24 May 2008, Etaoin Shrdlu wrote:
> On Saturday 24 May 2008, 17:22, Robin Atwood wrote:
> > Regexs are not my strong point! I am trying to get a list of service
> > scripts that provide virtual services. Each such script contains a
> > line like:
> >
> > 	provide dns
> >
> > i.e. the line starts with one or more spaces, followed by the text
> > "provide", followed by one or more spaces and a single word. i have
> > come up with:
> >
> > 	 grep -e ^\s+provide\s+\w /etc/init.d
> >
> > but, as usual, nothing is matched. What am I doing wrong?
>
> On my system, no initscript has the line "provide dns" in it, so it might
> be possible that you don't have any file with that line.
>
> That said, you should use -r, and you don't need the -e switch:
>
> grep -r '^[[:space:]]\{1,\}provide[[:space:]]\{1,\}dns' /etc/init.d
>
> or, perhaps clearer
>
> grep -rE '^[[:space:]]+provide[[:space:]]+dns' /etc/init.d

I am looking for all the scripts with lines like "provide xxx", not just the 
dns service. That said, your solution did the trick! I amended the expression 
to:

	 grep -rE '^[[:space:]]+provide[[:space:]]+\w+' /etc/init.d
	
and got what I was after. But why does "[[:space:]]+" work and "\s+" fail?

Cheers
-Robin
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