grep without spaces

[wrathkeg]

Hi,

I am trying to search through text files using grep (though if there is a better tool for the job, I could use something else). I want to identify all of the instances of the characters "a", "n", "d", in that order, but without spaces between them. I can do this:

grep "a.*n.*d" foo.txt
which seems to work, with the exception that it returns all lines with those characters, even when there is an intervening space.

Does anyone have any ideas?

TIA

WK

[wrathkeg]

just after I posted, I found what seems to be the answer: using [^ ] in the pattern. If there are better ideas, I'd still love to hear them.
WK

[ghostdog74]

can you post your sample file, and describe what you want to grep

[amo-ej1]

grep -e "a[^\ ]*n[^\ ]*d"

Would've been my suggestion to.

If you're only working with ascii test (searching within a string) you could use



grep -e "a[a-z]*n[a-z]*d"

[eph1973]

Not sure I understand what you are asking, but it looks like you are looking for something like

grep ".*and.*"which should return the whole line if the letters "and" are together with no spaces in between them. Place the option -n if you want which line number each occurs.

If you are looking for the letters "and" in a word, but not necessarily next to each other, you could use:

grep ".*\w*a\w*n\w*d.*"