Bug 447537

Summary:	grep -P matches across multiple lines
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5	Reporter:	Petr Šplíchal <psplicha>
Component:	grep	Assignee:	Stepan Kasal <kasal>
Status:	CLOSED DEFERRED	QA Contact:
Severity:	low	Docs Contact:
Priority:	low
Version:	5.3	CC:	ohudlick
Target Milestone:	rc
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
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Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
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Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2008-07-18 16:01:54 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Petr Šplíchal 2008-05-20 13:31:22 UTC

When interpreting supplied pattern as perl regular expression grep displays
match across multiple lines --- in spite of the ^beginning-of-line character
specified in the pattern.

Actual result:
$ echo -e "\n\n\n   foo" | grep -P '^\s*foo'



   foo

Expected result:
The leading empty lines should be omitted from the output:

$ echo -e "\n\n\n   foo" | grep -P '^\s*foo'
   foo

Comment 1 Stepan Kasal 2008-07-18 16:01:54 UTC

Unfortunately, the -P option of GNU grep is still only an experimental feature
in the upstream source.