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I'm trying to grep username users |grep "^\b\w*\b" -P how to do it with grep?

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Why grep? grep is for searching. You seem to need either cut or awk, but the read builtin also seems suitable. – manatwork Dec 7 '12 at 12:20
this work as @peterph proposed ^\w*\b. Are cut or sed/awk more convinient? my case is simple. i can use myVar=`users | grep -o "^\w*\b"`, no? – Yurij73 Dec 7 '12 at 13:23
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Compare them: users | cut -d' ' -f1, users | sed 's/\s.*//', users | awk '$0=$1'. If you want to store it in a variable, using bash: read myVar blah < <(users) or read myVar blah <<< $(users). – manatwork Dec 7 '12 at 13:33
@Yurij73 the difference lies mostly in the execution time. with read you don't spawn a new process. If you do this many times, you'll notice the difference. – peterph Dec 7 '12 at 15:19
Does it better use awk? #!/bin/bash ( users|awk '$0=$1' )>file; read myVar <file; rm -f file; echo $myVar; – Yurij73 Dec 7 '12 at 20:03

1 Answer

up vote 2 down vote accepted

If you really want return just the first word and want to do this with grep and your grep happens to be a recent version of GNU grep, you probably want the -o option. I believe you can do this without the -P and the \b at the beginning is not really necessary. Hence: users | grep -o "^\w*\b".

Yet, as @manatwork mentioned, shell built-in read or cut/sed/awk seem to be more appropriate (particularly once you get to the point you'd need to do something more).

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fine, all done. thanks – Yurij73 Dec 7 '12 at 13:20

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