[NMLUG] grep help

[aaron at boim.com (Aaron NMLUG-EV)]

On Wed, 2005-03-16 at 22:19, havoc wrote:
> Ed Heron wrote:
> >  I'm writing a bash script that needs to check if a particular person is 
> > in a specific group.
> > 
> >  I'm using:
> > 
> > if grep "^${group}:.*[:,]${user}[,$]" /etc/group >/dev/null ; then echo 
> > "${user} is a member of ${group}" ; fi
> > 
> >  Unfortunately, if $user is last in the list it appears to be false.  If 
> > I `grep "^${group}:.*[:,]${user}$" /etc/group` it succeeds.
> > 
> >  I don't use many regexp, am I missing something?
> 
> Looks like the square brackets are breaking '$' as a metacharacter. I 
> used alternation instead, and got success:

So...  might it be as simple as 
     grep "^${group}:.*[:,]${user}[,\$]"

                 aaron