On Mon, 9 Dec 2013, canito at dalan.us wrote: > Quoting Mike Miller <mbmiller+l at gmail.com>: > >> I'm not sure of exactly what your issue is. I'm thinking you need the >> "--", so I made a script with that, exactly like this: >> >> >> -------begin script on next line--------- >> #!/bin/bash >> >> PATTERN=$1 >> >> grep -Eic -- "$PATTERN" >> -------end script on previous line--------- >> >> >> And I ran it: >> >> >> $ echo -e "-testa\n-testb\nblah\nfoo\nbar\ntest\na-test" | ./script -test >> 3 >> >> >> That's the right answer. Note that if you don't have a filename, you have >> to grep from stdin, which is what I did. >> >> Mike > > Thank you Mike- > > Not sure what the problem is either. I've had a couple of issues with > egrep/grep on Red Hat. > > Again, I do appreciate the follow up. What version of grep are you using? This is mine: $ grep --version GNU grep 2.5.4 $ egrep --version GNU grep 2.5.4 I read somewhere a few years ago that egrep was deprecated and that we were supposed to use "grep -E" instead. I doubt that's the problem (at least on my system, I get the same result with egrep as with "grep -E"). I know that earlier versions of the perl grep, grep -P, were pretty buggy but I've had better luck recently. Mike