How can I display all the lines that end with a certain character using grep?

Question

I want to write a command to display all the lines in a given file that end with a ";" or a "." character.

Why does this not work?

grep ".';' | .'\.'" filename

I fixed your titles so they were actually meaning something. It would be great – if you post a question – to make your title really specific about what you want to do, not "Unix grep".

Stephen Jennings · Accepted Answer · 2011-10-04 04:52:04Z

up vote 4 down vote accepted

grep "[;.]$" list-of-files

This matches any line which contains either ; or . followed by the end of the line.

edited Oct 4 '11 at 4:52

Stephen Jennings
14.7k32169

answered Oct 4 '11 at 1:39

JRobert
4,272716

	.. how does this work ? – ricedragon Oct 4 '11 at 3:08
	@ricedragon it's regex notation. [abc] means a or b or c. $ means match end of line. play with regex coach and see regular-expressions.info and grep -P is a bit more flexible. – barlop Oct 4 '11 at 4:04

1 Answer