Just be honest with your teacher is all I ask. Probably I should have provided a 'teaching' example that was not the exact answer, but this was such a small, trivial problem I just answered it during my coffee break. My purpose in providing this answer is to help you understand a tiny bit more about grep, which millions of us use every single day in our lives to get our work done, so it really is worth learning. Your teacher will be more impressed with your honesty, and probably won't ding you if you can say, 'I get it, I get it, look at these other examples I tested and they worked too!' A teacher's main goal is that you learn and understand, not that you get some score. Which, translated, means, 'match lines that have a comma, zero or more spaces or tabs, NV, zero or more spaces or tabs, and nothing more before the end of the line.'īy the way, if this is homework, and not for your job or home project, technically you should probably admit to your teacher that you asked for help on StackOverflow. Or, even safer, if you don't trust there always to be a space between the comma and NV: grep ',*NV*$' sample-data > result.txt The Linux grep command is a useful tool for string and pattern matching, allowing you to search through text files using various options. In short, I think what you want, to be safe, is: grep ' NV*$' sample-data > result.txt See below: $ grep ' NV$' sample-data > result.txt So to guard against that, I put * between the NV and the $ (end of line symbol) in the grep pattern, and I got the result I expected. I copy/pasted your sample data into a file called sample-data and tried the grep pattern I would have used ( ' NV$'), but then I found only one line came through, the last one, because there was whitespace after the NV in the first line. In bash (4.3.

Grep pattern matching with new line