How to grep for a single quote?

Question

I am grepping through some VB source files. I use the following query -

     grep -nr "GlobalCommArea\s*=\s*.*\.Transaction" . 

Some of the lines, however, are commented and begin with a single line comment. A single line comment in VB starts with a single quote - '

Unfortunately, I cannot simply remove all those lines that have a single quote in them, because some of the lines have a single quote comment after the line of code.

So I tried something like this to remove the single quote at the start of the line

     grep -nr "GlobalCommArea\s*=\s*.*\.Transaction" . | grep -v "^\s*'"

However, this did not work. How to do this?

Answer 1

You are using grep -n which prefixes matches with line numbers, so your second pattern "^\s*'" will never match. Instead, you can use one single regex:

grep -nr "^[^']*GlobalCommArea\s*=\s*.*\.Transaction" .

This searches for instances of your pattern not preceded by any single quotes.