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

Actualy the .*? only works in perl. I am not sure what the equivalent grep extended regexp syntax would be. Fortunately you can use perl syntax with grep so grep -P would work but grep -E which is same as egrep would not work (it would be greedy).

See also: http://blog.vinceliu.com/2008/02/non-greedy-regular-expression-matching.html