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djneely
Asked: 2016-10-19 10:55:34 +0800 CST

Grep Not Working (on some files)?

  • 772

I have a MSSQL database dump I'm trying to grep through. However, grep does not seem to work on it, at all. Here is a snippet of the file.

...
    ALTER DATABASE [Documents] SET RECURSIVE_TRIGGERS OFF
    GO
    ALTER DATABASE [Documents] SET  DISABLE_BROKER
    GO
    ALTER DATABASE [Documents] SET AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS_ASYNC OFF
...

However when I do a grep on it I get nada.

$ cat Documents.sql | grep -i 'alter'
$ <nothing>
$ cat Documents.sql | grep -i 'go'
$ <nothing>

For giggles I created another document 'tempfile' with:

$ cat tempfile 
alter

Alter

ALTER
$

And ran the same grep on it:

$ cat tempfile | grep -i 'alter'
alter
Alter
ALTER

Thoughts on why grep wouldn't work on certain files? Concerns me that when I have to grep through a bunch of stuff to find a small nugget, it 'may' be missing something. Thoughts?

grep

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Ahh. Thank you.

    $ file -bi Documents.txt
text/plain; charset=utf-16le
$ vi Documents.txt

set encoding=utf-8
set fileencoding=utf-8

$ file -bi Documents.txt
text/plain; charset=utf-8
$ cat Documents.txt | grep -i 'alter'
ALTER DATABASE [Documents] SET COMPATIBILITY_LEVEL = 120
ALTER DATABASE [Documents] SET ANSI_NULL_DEFAULT OFF 
ALTER DATABASE [Documents] SET ANSI_NULLS OFF 
ALTER DATABASE [Documents] SET ANSI_PADDING OFF
    • 8

  2. I faced the same issue with database dump. The other solution by setting the encoding using vi worked for me.

    I prefer using dos2unix command and it worked as well.

    • 0