using \b with grep pattern

Question

I am learning bash and I have come across regular expressions. There is an exercise where I have to match a word and I tried to use \\b<word>\\b but for some reason it was not matched until I used \\\\b<word>\\\\b . I actually tried it out of desperation when I couldn't understand why \\b wasn't working.

Answer 1

You are proabably using grep \\bword\\b which is really grep bwordb after bash parses the backslashes.

Use grep '\\bword\\b' (note the single-quotes).

Answer 2

您也可以使用grep -w word仅匹配整个单词。