On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 6:43 PM, Barry Brimer <lists at brimer.org> wrote: > > The egrep is using a leading anchor (^) to make sure the grep matches the > beginning of the line. If not, and the group pattern matched as one of the > users it would print those lines too .. which is probably undesirable. > Grep understands the '^', so egrep is not needed. Typically, you only need egrep for patterns that involve alternative re's, like looking for one of "abc|def|ghi" which grep does not recognize. Also, it might be helpful to trim your replies so we don't need to wade through the whole thread to see your reply. mhr