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I was trying to search for lines that start with create and end in ;. The match may span multiple lines. I was trying to use grep for that and after searching internet I found out how to do it.

The following query does it

grep -zioE 'create (\w|\W|\n)*?;' Day1.sql | less # Output create schema sigmoid_db; create table instructor( ID char(5), name varchar(20), dept_name varchar(20), salary numeric(8,2)); 

What I want to ask why wouldn't the same query without \n work? Like the following query should produce the same output

grep -zioE 'create (\w|\W)*?;' Day1.sql | less # Output create schema sigmoid_db; 

My reasoning is \w and \W should match any character. But the second command doesn't print the patterns that span multiple lines.

Can anyone tell why so?

I was trying to search for lines that start with create and end in ;. The match may span multiple lines. I was trying to use grep for that and after searching internet I found out how to do it.

The following query does it

grep -zioE 'create (\w|\W|\n)*?;' Day1.sql | less # Output create schema sigmoid_db; create table instructor( ID char(5), name varchar(20), dept_name varchar(20), salary numeric(8,2)); 

What I want to ask why wouldn't the same query without \n work? Like the following query should produce the same output

grep -zioE 'create (\w|\W)*?;' Day1.sql | less # Output create schema sigmoid_db; 

My reasoning is \w|\W should match any character. But the second command doesn't print the patterns that span multiple lines.

Can anyone tell why so?

I was trying to search for lines that start with create and end in ;. The match may span multiple lines. I was trying to use grep for that and after searching internet I found out how to do it.

The following query does it

grep -zioE 'create (\w|\W|\n)*?;' Day1.sql | less # Output create schema sigmoid_db; create table instructor( ID char(5), name varchar(20), dept_name varchar(20), salary numeric(8,2)); 

What I want to ask why wouldn't the same query without \n work? Like the following query should produce the same output

grep -zioE 'create (\w|\W)*?;' Day1.sql | less # Output create schema sigmoid_db; 

My reasoning is \w and \W should span all characters. But the second command doesn't print the patterns that span multiple lines.

Can anyone tell why so?

I was trying to search for lines that start with create and end in ;. The match may span multiple lines. I was trying to use grep for that and after searching internet I found out how to do it.

The following query does it

grep -zioE 'create (\w|\W|\n)*?;' Day1.sql | less # Output create schema sigmoid_db; create table instructor( ID char(5), name varchar(20), dept_name varchar(20), salary numeric(8,2)); 

What I want to ask why wouldn't the same query without \n work? Like the following query should produce the same output

grep -zioE 'create (\w|\W)*?;' Day1.sql | less # Output create schema sigmoid_db; 

My reasoning is \w and \W should match any character. But the second command doesn't print the patterns that span multiple lines.

Can anyone tell why so?