how do i write a regular expression using grep to find lines that start with 'O' or 'o' AND contain 2 consecutive chracters

Question

how do i write a regular expression using grep to find lines that start with 'O' or 'o' AND contain 2 consecutive 'c' characters.

grep '^[Oo]c{2}' filename

Answer 1

You were 99% there, very close, just:

grep '^[Oo]c\{2\}' filename

or equivalent:

grep -E '^[Oo]c{2}' filename

Regular expressions

• as you know ^[Oo]c , the caret ^ matches beginning, and any of the characters within [] are matched
• you were very close with c{2}, where you meant to match the previous character c, exactly two times.
• however grep by default interprets Basic Regular Expressions which does not interpret { as a meta-character for use with this kind of matching, so we change it to \{ and \} to make it recognize it
• alternatively you could enable Extended Regular Expressions to avoid the backslash: grep -E '^[Oo]c{2}' filename

If that does not match, maybe copy a sample of the contents of your test filename that does include what you are trying to match, and update the question to display it, in case there is something else we missed.

Answer 2

You already have a pure regex answer but here's a more grepish one:

grep -i ^occ file

The -i flag tells grep to do case insensitive matching. It is defined by POSIX so should be present in any grep implementation. Once you have that, since you only want two c characters, there's no reason to complicate things by using {2}; cc is both shorter and clearer. However, note that the -i applies to the entire reguex so this will also match cC or CC or Cc. If you don't want that, use @user454038's approach instead.

If you also need to match lines where the consecutive cs are not directly after the o, use this instead:

grep -i '^o.*cc' file