Why doesn't grep give the matching line?

Question

I've just noticed that

grep -rni 'a2}' *

does not give ~~all documents that have a string a2}~~ the matching line. Why is this the case?

I've tried to create a minimal example, but when I create a new file and paste the content, it fails. So I've uploaded the file to a Git repository. Perhaps it's a encoding problem.

The content of the file is:

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\chapter{KV-Diagramme}
\label{chap:a2}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
  \PsTexAbbildungOhneCaption{figures/a2-1}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

%%% Local Variables:
%%% mode: latex
%%% TeX-master: "skript"
%%% End:

The result of grep -rni 'a2}' * is

moose@pc08 ~/Downloads/algorithms/grep $ grep -rni "a2}" *
%%% End:master: "skript"%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

but I expected

moose@pc08 ~/Downloads/algorithms/grep $ grep -rni "a2}" *
\label{chap:a2}

Why do I get this result?

I get the following output: `tmp.txt:3:\label{chap:a2}` – Nir Alfasi Aug 10 '13 at 05:29 — Nir Alfasi, Aug 10 '13 at 05:29
That's odd: I get the result you were expecting. – jrd1 Aug 10 '13 at 05:29 — jrd1, Aug 10 '13 at 05:29
Me too ... same result as expected – woofmeow Aug 10 '13 at 05:39 — woofmeow, Aug 10 '13 at 05:39

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 10 '13 at 05:41

0

The file has CR line terminators so it looks a a single-line file:

#> file anhang-2.tex
anhang-2.tex: LaTeX document, ASCII text, with CR line terminators

convert it to Linux format:

#>  mac2unix anhang-2.tex
mac2unix: converting file anhang-2.tex to Unix format ...
#>  grep -rni 'a2}' anhang-2.tex 
3:\label{chap:a2}

answered Aug 10 '13 at 05:41

perreal

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How can I check for all `.tex` files in a folder if they have CR line terminators? – Martin Thoma Aug 10 '13 at 05:50
Try this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/73833/how-do-you-search-for-files-containing-dos-line-endings-crlf-with-grep-on-linu – cyberwombat Aug 10 '13 at 05:53
@moose, `file *tex | grep CR` – perreal Aug 10 '13 at 05:56

cyberwombat · Answer 2 · 2013-08-10T06:02:07.123

0

It's because your file is using Mac OS 9 line endings. You will need to first translate to UNIX line endings. How you do so depends on your scenario but you can do one file with this:

tr '\r' '\n' < anhang-2.tex > anhang-2.txt

Then you will be able to grep that new file.

edited Aug 10 '13 at 06:02

answered Aug 10 '13 at 05:52

cyberwombat

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@perreal you are correct about the line termination. I just made a quick assumption. Edited answer. Thanks. – cyberwombat Aug 10 '13 at 06:02

Why doesn't grep give the matching line?

2 Answers2