[CentOS] grep question

Wed Aug 30 21:24:48 UTC 2006
Seán O Sullivan <seanos at seanos.net>

Jerry Geis wrote:
> bats at tt
> net-bats at tt
>
> and I do a "grep -v bats" (intention was to get everything except bats 
> but net-bats was mistakenly grepped)
>
> How do I specify the beginning of the line and match after that so 
> bats is caught not net-bats?
>
grep -v ^bats file

Regards,

Sean