GREP negative numbers

[OliverW]

I have a couple of textfiles which contain number between -3 to -24. What would be the appropriate way to get all numbers between -15 and above (so -16, -17 etc etc) excluding everything between -3 and -14???

Hope anyone can give me a hint...

[Strike]

dunno if grep can do ranges, but you can do it in a big for loop in bash:


for i in -15 -16 -17 -18 -19 -20 -21 -22 -23 -24; do
grep "$i" myfiles*
done


There's probably a better way of doing that range, but that should work.

[OliverW]

Mmm is there a way just to pick -15 and above (or below, depends on how you see it). Cause it's not certain that I have -24 -27 or -21, I have fairly random numbers betwen -3 and -30 of which I only need the numbers between -15 and -30

Next to that I'm curious on how to use that shell script on my textfiles...

[Strike]

just make a list up to the lowest number you need

you can type that in at the command line if you want

[nuisance]

I haven't tried this, but would 'grep [-] <file>|grep [15-30]' work?

[ 10 July 2001: Message edited by: nuisance ]

[The Kooman]

[B]Assumption[B]: You're dealing with only (1 or) 2 digit numbers.


~. grep '\(-1[5-9]\)\|\(-[2-9][0-9]\)' filename


This should catch all 2 digit (negative) numbers less than (and including) 15. i.e. from -15 to -99

HTH

--
Koo

[Rob 'Feztaa' Park]

I'm not sure that grep supports regex that complicated all by itself. I think you have to add the -E flag to get that one running.

[bdg1983]

one thing that may come up is that grep may try and interpret negative numbers as command line flags (like it might think you are trying to use an option -9 instead of searching for negative 9). to get it to work around this, use grep -e -9.