How to do a non-greedy match in grep?

Question

I want to grep the shortest match and the pattern should be something like:

...
...
...

... mean

Answer 1

You're looking for a non-greedy (or lazy) match. To get a non-greedy match in regular expressions you need to use the modifier ? after the quantifier. For example you can change .* to .*?.

By default grep doesn't support non-greedy modifiers, but you can use grep -P to use the Perl syntax.