I want to grep the shortest match and the pattern should be something like:
<car ... model=BMW ...>
...
...
...
</car>
... means any character and the input is multiple lines.
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.