# Using grep with hyphens



## woodson2 (Jan 31, 2013)

This is on a RHEL 6 box with bash 4.1.2

I'm trying to to use grep to only find those lines containing matches that form whole words.

The -w option works fantastic unless of course that word has a hyphen.

The problem is I will get a hit on "test-group" which is a good thing, but I will also get a hist on "test" which is bad because the group test doesn't exist. It appears that once grep hits a hyphen it treats the preceding text as a whole word.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Next time no groups with hyphens..

Thanks


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## DutchDaemon (Jan 31, 2013)

Show the commands you're using, and associated output.


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## wblock@ (Jan 31, 2013)

woodson2 said:
			
		

> This is on a RHEL 6 box with bash 4.1.2



This seems to be an odd place to be asking about that, then...



> I'm trying to to use grep to only find those lines containing matches that form whole words.
> 
> The -w option works fantastic unless of course that word has a hyphen.
> 
> The problem is I will get a hit on "test-group" which is a good thing, but I will also get a hist on "test" which is bad because the group test doesn't exist. It appears that once grep hits a hyphen it treats the preceding text as a whole word.



`# grep -w test -- myfile`


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