1

I created one table of employees.

    1 Andy Account
    2 Grecie HR
    3 Jyorge Marketing
    4 Seeya HR
    5 Princy Account
    6 Siya Production

Here the names of 4th employee and 6th employee are same but spellings are different. So i want to display only that records using grep command. I tried it like:

grep S[iee]ya emp

and 

grep S[[i][ee]]ya emp

but it didn't work. Any solution?

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  • 1
    you can also use grep -e 'Seeya' -e 'Siya' ... helps if you want to add -F option as well – Sundeep Jul 18 '17 at 12:23
  • You might also want to use the -w (whole word) option for this command. – Toby Speight Jul 18 '17 at 17:28
  • to do this properly, you probably should use a language like perl or python that has a library implementing the Soundex or similar algorithm. – cas Jul 19 '17 at 1:24
9

You need the OR operator '|' in grep:

grep -E 'S(i|ee)ya' emp

4 Seeya HR
6 Siya Production
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10

[...] creates a character class, not a group, you want to use a group that contains an | or operator

grep 'S\(ee\|i\)ya' emp

will do such a group and find those two lines. You can also clean that up a bit by telling grep to use extended regex with -E, then you don't have to escape the characters to make them special

grep -E 'S(ee|i)ya' emp
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-2
grep 'S.*ya'

seems to work also. The * quantifier matches between zero and unlimited times.

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  • 1
    Would this not possibly match some unwanted things? – Stephen Rauch Jul 18 '17 at 18:02
  • 2
    Would also return true if the name is 'Shit ya' – GypsyCosmonaut Jul 18 '17 at 18:28

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