Grep with ERE doesn't filter lines with -v option

Question

I'm trying to use the extended regex option in grep to filter out from files, lines that have the following format of string at the beginning of the line.

any-non-space-char:      *

I'd assumed that the following command was going to do the trick; however, it just printed out all the lines from the 2 files that are picked-up by the wildcard.

~/tmp > cat * | grep -v -E "^\S+:.{6}\*"
hi
test1      blah, blah, blah:      * blah, blah, blah"
test:      * blah, blah, blah:      * blah, blah, blah
sd
hi
temp:      * blah, blah, blah:      * blah, blah, blah"
temp2:     blah, blah, blah:      * blah, blah, blah
sd
~/tmp >

BTW, I alias grep to 'grep --color=auto', so the command does highlight the matching strings as per the regex correctly which are test: * on line 3 and temp: * on line 6 in the above output. Nonetheless, these matching lines get printed on the screen which I didn't expect.

The contents of the two files:

~/tmp > ls -l
total 8
-rw-rw-r-- 1 pmn ccusers 116 Dec 11 09:22 1
-rw-rw-r-- 1 pmn ccusers 116 Dec 11 09:23 2
~/tmp >

~/tmp > cat 1
hi
test1      blah, blah, blah:      * blah, blah, blah"
test:      * blah, blah, blah:      * blah, blah, blah
sd
~/tmp >

~/tmp > cat 2
hi
temp:      * blah, blah, blah:      * blah, blah, blah"
temp2:     blah, blah, blah:      * blah, blah, blah
sd
~/tmp >

BTW, the following is similar to what I expect:

~/tmp > cat * | grep -v -E ":.{6}*"
hi
sd
hi
sd
~/tmp >

Which removed the lines

test1      blah, blah, blah:      * blah, blah, blah"
test:      * blah, blah, blah:      * blah, blah, blah
temp:      * blah, blah, blah:      * blah, blah, blah"
temp2:     blah, blah, blah:      * blah, blah, blah

(it also removed lines 1 and 4 above which is not what I want - hence this grep command won't work for me).

I know how to get this to work on PERL; however, for certain reasons I can use only grep, awk or sed.

How do I get this to work?

---

@PsychoData

Thanks for your response. I'm afraid the command did not do the trick. Your command returned the following

~/tmp > cat * | grep -v -E "^[^\S]+:.{6}\*"  
hi  
sd  
hi  
sd  
~/tmp >

which is the same as the output returned by grep -v -E ":.{6}*" in my question, which, however, is not what I wanted. I wanted a command to bring the following output:

hi  
test1      blah, blah, blah:      * blah, blah, blah"  
sd  
hi  
temp2:     blah, blah, blah:      * blah, blah, blah  
sd

IMHO, yours removed the following lines because ^[^\S]+: does a greedy-match, matching as much of the line as possible - which as you can see is until the right-most '*' in the following lines.

test1      blah, blah, blah:      * blah, blah, blah"  
test:      * blah, blah, blah:      * blah, blah, blah  
temp:      * blah, blah, blah:      * blah, blah, blah"  
temp2:     blah, blah, blah:      * blah, blah, blah

BTW, please note that there are exactly 6 spaces between each : and * pair. I think the formatting makes this hard to notice.

Answer 1

try grep -v -E "^[^\S]+:.{6}\*"

Okay. So what I am doing with this is telling it that I want every line that does not contain the following pattern, and enabling extended expressions:

match the start of a line, then [anything EXCEPT whitespace] at least once,then a colon, then 6 characters, then an asterisk

anything that does not match that pattern will be shown

Answer 2

There is no way of doing a non-greedy match in extended regular expressions. You can, however, easily do it with PCREs:

$ grep -hvP "^[^\s]+?:\s+\*" *
hi
test1      blah, blah, blah:      * blah, blah, blah"
sd
hi
temp2:     blah, blah, blah:      * blah, blah, blah
sd

You don't need to cat the files, grep can open them directly. The -h option turns of printing of the file name (necessary when not cating) and the -P turns on PCREs. You then search for one or more non-space characters at the beginning of the line ^[^\s]+?, followed by a :, one or more spaces (\s+) and finally a * (you need to escape the * else it is treated as a quantifier).