Cygwin grep and -f switch

Question

I've created a text file (in Windows) with the text patterns I wish to search for. Using the -f switch, grep only searches for the last pattern in the list. If there is a blank line, grep finds nothing.

grep -a -A 4 -f Grep.txt my.file

Any suggestions to get this to work?

Thanks

Answer 1

Check to be sure each line in your pattern file ends with only a \n character Unix-style, not a Windows-style \r\n combination. To the Cygwin grep, a \r is an ordinary character that it would try to match.

You can delete the \r characters with tr:

tr -d "\r" < infile > outfile