Re: patterns

[Paul Jarc]

Ken Senior <address@hidden> wrote:
> cat file.txt | awk '/^[a-z]/ {print $0}'

This is equivalent to, but more expensive than:

awk '/^[a-z]/ {print $0}' < file.txt

> incorrectly returns not only those entries beginning with a lower case
> letter, but also upper case ones as well.

You're probably using a locale where uppercase and lowercase letters
are ordered together, like AaBbCc...Zz, so the range a-z includes B-Z.
You can use the "C" locale to use ASCII order.  Set LC_ALL=C or
LC_COLLATE=C in your environment.


paul