Created Sc2062 (markdown)

koalaman
2013-11-10 12:21:32 -08:00
parent ed11c74109
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# Quote the grep pattern so the shell won't interpret it.
### Problematic code
grep foo* file
### Correct code
grep "foo*" file
### Rationale
The regex passed to grep frequently contains characters that collide with globs. The code above is supposed to match "f followed by 1 or more o's", but if the directory contains a file called "foo.txt", an unquoted pattern will cause it to become `grep foo.txt file`.
To prevent this, always quote the regex passed to grep, especially when it contains one or more glob character.