Bug in grep

[vschulz]

• [X ] I was not able to find an open or closed issue matching what I'm seeing

Setup

• Which version of Git for Windows are you using? Is it 32-bit or 64-bit?
  64-bit

$ git --version --build-options

git version 2.29.2.windows.2
cpu: x86_64
built from commit: 3464b98ce6803c98bf8fb34390cd150d66e4a0d3
sizeof-long: 4
sizeof-size_t: 8
shell-path: /bin/sh

• Which version of Windows are you running? Vista, 7, 8, 10? Is it 32-bit or 64-bit?
  10 64-bit

$ cmd.exe /c ver

Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.19041.572]

• What options did you set as part of the installation? Or did you choose the
  defaults?

# One of the following:
> type "C:\Program Files\Git\etc\install-options.txt"
> type "C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\etc\install-options.txt"
> type "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Programs\Git\etc\install-options.txt"
$ cat /etc/install-options.txt

Editor Option: Notepad++
Custom Editor Path:
Default Branch Option:
Path Option: Cmd
SSH Option: OpenSSH
Tortoise Option: false
CURL Option: OpenSSL
CRLF Option: CRLFAlways
Bash Terminal Option: MinTTY
Git Pull Behavior Option: Merge
Use Credential Manager: Core
Performance Tweaks FSCache: Enabled
Enable Symlinks: Disabled
Enable Pseudo Console Support: Disabled

• Any other interesting things about your environment that might be related
  to the issue you're seeing?

** insert your response here **

Details

• Which terminal/shell are you running Git from? e.g Bash/CMD/PowerShell/other

** insert your response here **
CMD

• What commands did you run to trigger this issue? If you can provide a
  Minimal, Complete, and Verifiable example
  this will help us understand the issue.

C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin>grep.exe '^20'  C:\Users\vpsch\Desktop\test.txt

C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin>cat.exe   C:\Users\vpsch\Desktop\test.txt

• What did you expect to occur after running these commands?

20 should be found

20 should be found
x20 should not be found

• What actually happened instead?

20 should be found
x20 should not be found

20 should be found
x20 should not be found

• If the problem was occurring with a specific repository, can you provide the
  URL to that repository to help us with testing?

** insert URL here **

[dscho]

* What commands did you run to trigger this issue? If you can provide a
  [Minimal, Complete, and Verifiable example](http://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve)
  this will help us understand the issue.

C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin>grep.exe '^20'  C:\Users\vpsch\Desktop\test.txt

C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin>cat.exe   C:\Users\vpsch\Desktop\test.txt

* What did you expect to occur after running these commands?

20 should be found

20 should be found
x20 should not be found

* What actually happened instead?

20 should be found
x20 should not be found

20 should be found
x20 should not be found

I am embarrassed to admit that I do not understand what this report is trying to tell me. Did you mean to show the actual contents of test.txt and the actual grep output?

[vschulz]

Sorry for the lack of clarity. The contents of test.txt is
20 should be found
x20 should not be found

grep is ignoring the ^ in pattern matching, so grep ^20 is matching in line with text x20 should not be found. Grep works properly in ubuntu 20 command line etc, and also in the versions in C:\Program Files\Git\bin\bash.exe and sh.exe. This affects other software that imports git-for-windows such as cmder

[Project-Magenta]

Are you sure there's a bug? ^ is the shell escape character in cmd.exe

[landstander668]

As Project-Magenta mentioned, I'm pretty sure this is due to cmd.exe treating ^ as an escape character. Here's a quick test to demonstrate its effect:

C:\Users\adric> echo '^20'
'20'

C:\Users\adric> echo '^^20'
'^20'

[landstander668]

so kind of like a Git CMD bug

Not really a bug per se... more of a difference in expectation vs implementation. This was an artifact of Windows' built-in cmd.exe interpreter, which simply behaves differently than a unix-like shell... it's handling of quoted arguments being another notable example, IIRC. As a result, it's not really all that uncommon to need to tweak command syntax slightly when working on the Git CMD side of the fence. The differences can most certainly be confusing, however.

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[Project-Magenta]

that's why I edited