How to use grep on dictionary-like file

Question

Here is the output of journald via journalctl -o verbose . I was trying to narrow it down and filter only desired values.

   Fr 2016-12-02 18:54:33.675283 CET [s=asd;i=4;b=asdasd;m=asdasd;t=asdasd;x=asdasda]
        PRIORITY=6
        _BOOT_ID=5asd
        _MACHINE_ID=3asd
        _HOSTNAME=asd
        _SOURCE_MONOTONIC_TIMESTAMP=0
        _TRANSPORT=kernel
        SYSLOG_FACILITY=0
        SYSLOG_IDENTIFIER=kernel
        MESSAGE=Iasdasadt
        _SYSTEMD_CGROUP=/system.slice/systemd-journald.service
        _SYSTEMD_UNIT=systemd-journald.service

When I apply something like -after I dump results into a .txt-

egrep -in -o --color '_SYSTEMD_UNIT=[^\n]*' /JOURNALD/verbose.txt

It returns;

_SYSTEMD_UNIT=systemd-jour

Instead of;

_SYSTEMD_UNIT=systemd-journald.service

I believe I am absolutely missing a fundamental point. However, I was unable to find it up until now. Do not hesitate to share your ideas.

Answer 1

\n in your regular expression doesn't match newlines; it's matching the "n" in "journald." ([^\n] is matching anything but a literal \ or n character here.) You should instead use .*$, which matches any sequence of characters up to the end of the line:

egrep -in -o --color '_SYSTEMD_UNIT=.*$' /JOURNALD/verbose.txt