grep find lines that contains " \t"

Question

I was requested to make a shell script to check for simple mistakes in files. I wanted to find, for each line if

(regex:) "[ ]\t" ever happens.

The problem is that grep is ignoring the \ and is taking "t" as a literal. I also tried writting the characters themselves in a file and asking grep to read it but it didn't work. Is there a way to find for the regex " \t" in files using any of the usual linux tools (like grep)?

I already tried:

grep -E --ignore-case --line-number --with-filename --file="b" file

(b contains: " ") and also:

grep -E --ignore-case --line-number --with-filename --regexp=" [\t]" file

kev · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-31T09:12:04.730

17

You can use C-style string $'...'

grep $'\t' file.txt

Or sed:

sed -n '/\t/p' file.txt

edited Mar 31 '12 at 09:12

answered Mar 31 '12 at 09:05

kev

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do you mean: "$ grep $' \t' file.txt" ? – brunoais Mar 31 '12 at 09:10
That finds tabs. I need tabs after spaces. – brunoais Mar 31 '12 at 09:30

score 7 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 31 '12 at 09:17

7

You can use perl regex with --perl-regex option like

 grep --perl-regex "\t"

answered Mar 31 '12 at 09:17

ДМИТРИЙ МАЛИКОВ

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it says that that option does not exist. – brunoais Mar 31 '12 at 09:30
Works well with `GNU grep 2.11` – ДМИТРИЙ МАЛИКОВ Mar 31 '12 at 09:34
we are using v.2.4.2 (just checked) and I'm not allowed to update. Only the "higherups" may do something like that. – brunoais Mar 31 '12 at 10:10

grep find lines that contains " \t"

2 Answers2

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