Positive/Negative lookahead with grep and perl

Question

my login.txt file contains following entries

abc def
abc 123
def abc
abc de
tha ewe

when i do the positive lookahead using perl, i\'m getting t

Answer 1

In your perl -ne 'print if /(?)abc\s(?!def)/' you asking perl to find abc, then space, then string shouldn't be def. This is successfully matches with def abc, because there is no def after abc here and \s matches with newline.