How do you grep a character only?

Linux
1

Say I want to print only character. How do you grep a character only and then store that into a shell variable?

2

grep search pattern for single character:

  • . : Any single character
  • [...] : Any single character in the bracketed list or range
    So to grep a character only, you will do:
grep '.' filename

To match only one character:

grep -w '.' filename
result=$(grep -w '.' filename)
echo "$result"
3

thank you. I did it as

grep -w '[[:alpha:]]' data005.file
grep -w '[[:alnum:]]' data006.file

it took me while but it is now working.

4

Check our grep and egrep pages:

https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-use-grep-command-in-linux-unix/

And:
https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/grep-regular-expressions/