cat

Sample text file: file.txt
--------------------
Hello
there
-------------------

run:
cat file.txt | egrep -e "o$"
you will get nothing

run:
egrep -e "o$" file.txt'
you will get "Hello"

run:
egrep -e "^" file.txt | egrep -e "o$"
you get "Hello"

if you compare the result of runing:
cat file.txt
with:
egrep -e "^"
they look the same.

It seems 'cat' is chaning the output such that 'egrep' (grep -E) can't match the end-of-line marker correctly. Interestingly enough if you dont include a carrage return after the 'there' in the file then it seems to pick up 'cat file.txt | egrep -e "e$"' just fine or if you try this: 'cat file.txt | egrep -e "$"' it also seems to do what you would expect.

For the time being I have replaced cat.exe with a shell script as follows:
---------------------------
#!/bin/sh

egrep -e "^" $1
--------------------------

and that seems to be working for me. But this does seem like a bug.

Jim Carroll