[SOLVED] grep question - Trying to display lines in a text file that contains more than 2 specific characters

Issue

Got a file like:

$ cat file1.txt
123456
1234n5678nn
12n4567890123
123n56n89n1n

I am trying:

grep -E 'n{3,}' file1.txt

to get only lines that have more than two occurrences of n in them (do not have to be consecutive) but this did not work. The output I want is:

1234n5678nn
123n56n89n1n

Please note I have to do this with grep or egrep only - cannot use sed or awk.

Solution

You could do it like this:

grep -E '(n.*){3,}' file1.txt

Or using the method you've already tested and worked fine:

grep -E 'n.*n.*n' file1.txt

Answered By - Rfroes87