Re: Grep'ping on Unix without perl-compatible gnu grep - can you do it better?

[kielstirling]

perl -ne 'print if !/^#/ and /foo/' /tmp/foo.txt

is that what you want? Or using the regex for the above post

perl -ne 'print if /^[^#]*foo/' /tmp/foo.txt

[Tommy]

Very nice...except you still have to account for potential preceeding whitespace before the hashmark /^[[:space:]]{0,}#/