How can I find repeated words in a file using grep/egrep?

Question

I need to find repeated words in a file using egrep (or grep -e) in unix (bash)

I tried:

egrep "(\<[a-zA-Z]+\>) \1" file.txt

and

egrep "(\b[a-zA-Z]+\b) \1" file.txt

but for some reason these consider things to be repeats that aren't! for example, it thinks the string "word words" meets the criteria despite the word boundary condition \> or \b.

Answer 1

\1 matches whatever string was matched by the first capture. That is not the same as matching the same pattern as was matched by the first capture. So the fact that the first capture matched on a word boundary is no longer relevant, even though the \b is inside the capture parentheses.

If you want the second instance to also be on a word boundary, you need to say so:

egrep "(\b[a-zA-Z]+) \1\b" file.txt

That is no different from:

egrep "\b([a-zA-Z]+) \1\b" file.txt

The space in the pattern forces a word boundary, so I removed the redundant \bs. If you wanted to be more explicit, you could put them in:

egrep "\<([a-zA-Z]+)\> \<\1\>" file.txt

Answer 2

I use

pcregrep -M '(\b[a-zA-Z]+)\s+\1\b' *

to check my documents for such errors. This also works if there is a line break between the duplicated words.

Explanation:

• -M, --multiline run in multiline mode (important if a line break is between the duplicated words.
• [a-zA-Z]+: Match words
• \b: Word boundary, see tutorial
• (\b[a-zA-Z]+) group it
• \s+ match at least one (but as many more as necessary) whitespace characters. This includes newline.
• \1: Match whatever was in the first group

Answer 3

This is the expected behaviour. See what man grep says:

The Backslash Character and Special Expressions

The symbols \< and > respectively match the empty string at the beginning and end of a word. The symbol \b matches the empty string at the edge of a word, and \B matches the empty string provided it's not at the edge of a word. The symbol \w is a synonym for [[:alnum:]] and \W is a synonym for [^[:alnum:]].

and then in another place we see what "word" is:

Matching Control

Word-constituent characters are letters, digits, and the underscore.

So this is what will produce:

$ cat a
hello bye
hello and and bye
words words
this are words words
"words words"
$ egrep "(\b[a-zA-Z]+\b) \1" a
hello and and bye
words words
this are words words
"words words"
$ egrep "(\<[a-zA-Z]+\>) \1" a
hello and and bye
words words
this are words words
"words words"