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up vote 3 down vote favorite

In debugging, I use a lot of 'print' and commenting out it with '#print'. How can I use grep to find the line without '#' before 'print'? 

# print <- not detect
#print <- not detect
abc # print <-- not detect
print <- detect
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4  
Should it match (detect) foo # bar print ? – derobert Mar 13 at 15:37
1  
Should it match print '#';, print ''; # here we print, str='#'; print or str='# print'? There is probably no 100% safe expression without partially rebuilding the language's parser. – manatwork Mar 13 at 15:38
3  
Try grep '^[^#]*\bprint\b' input. – manatwork Mar 13 at 15:52

4 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted 
grep '^[^#]*print'

Would be print only preceded by non-# characters.

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up vote 1 down vote

Classic solution:

grep -v '^#' <input |grep 'print'
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The issue is that # can be anywhere in the line. I updated my post. – prosseek Mar 13 at 15:36
The solution greps for any line without the #, then checks for the word 'print'. – ThaMe90 Mar 13 at 15:38
1  
@prosseek Changing the requirements in a question after you receive an answer is not the right way. Better is to ask a new question. Never mind, luckily the solution works also for the changed requirements. But please do not change again the requirements. Ask instead a new question. – H.-Dirk Schmitt Mar 13 at 16:05
up vote 1 down vote

The easiest approach is probably going to be to use two greps, piped together.

$ grep 'print' <input | grep -v '#[[:space:]]*print'

With the file input containing your examples, that gives:

print <- detect

That works for all of your examples. Which is probably good enough, but as manatwork and I point out in comments, its going to be very difficult to defeat all the edge cases with grep.

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For this kind of job, weeding out 80% of the "should not detect" is probably good enough. – vonbrand Mar 13 at 16:27
up vote 1 down vote

I'm still learning but wouldn't the ff work as well? 

grep -v '#[ ]*print' input_file
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