OS X v10.7 - egrep Doesn't Work

Question

OS X v10.7 - egrep Doesn't Work

After a clean install of 10.7 I noticed that egrep is broken:

$ which egrep /usr/bin/egrep $ egrep --version egrep: conflicting matchers specified $ egrep a{2} egrep: conflicting matchers specified $ grep -E grep: conflicting matchers specified $ grep --version perl (GNU grep) 2.5.1 [snip license]

I updated to 10.7.2 in hope of a fix but nothing. Tried googling —nothing.

I'm fixin to install the latest version but this is quite an oddity. Any ideas?

Mac OS X (10.7.2)

Posted on Nov 20, 2011 11:02 PM

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Answer 1

Nov 20, 2011 11:45 PM in response to whatitdowhatitdontdowhatitizzz

Oops! GREP_OPTIONS=-P was set...

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Answer 2

Sep 4, 2016 10:53 PM in response to whatitdowhatitdontdowhatitizzz

Why was it set? where was it set? was it set by default? what does it mean?

I'm a bit worried because I need a script of mine to work on both Solaris and OSX.

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Answer 3

BobHarris

Level 9

57,011 points

Sep 5, 2016 3:46 AM in response to Danny Niu. Running a instance of Niux Unix operatig system.

Danny Niu. Running a instance of Niux Unix operatig system. wrote:

Why was it set? where was it set? was it set by default? what does it mean?

I'm a bit worried because I need a script of mine to work on both Solaris and OSX.

This is a 5 year old thread.

If you are having problems with grep or egrep maybe you should start a new post, and describe your problem.

I can tell you that I have a lot of shell scripts that run on OS X, Solaris, AIX, and Linux. I do not typically do anything fancy with egrep, but I do use it on occasion. With Solaris I have more problems with awk.

And for some of the non-POSIX commands I end up testing $(uname) and having platform specific conditional code.

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