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  • Appreciate your answer, did I miss something in my question. Do you mean that I simply can't do what I intended to do with a single grep? Commented Nov 28, 2016 at 9:51
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    @Inian, You can't easily with a single invocation of the current version of GNU grep (the one I suppose you're trying to use as it seems it supports -P and -o though that could also be the one of FreeBSD/OS/X that are rewrites of GNU grep). You can with other grep implementations like pcregrep. But I argue you're picking the wrong tool for the task. Use sed to edit streams. Commented Nov 28, 2016 at 9:54
  • I am quite easily able to do this only using bash native regex as [[ "$string" =~ .zoo.([[:digit:]]+).*:\ (.*)$ ]] and print as printf "%s\t%s\n" "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}" "${BASH_REMATCH[2]//[[:blank:]]}" Commented Nov 28, 2016 at 9:59
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    See edit. Replaced one space with \s+ as I suppose you had more than one space after the :. Also added a way to make sure the :\s+.* only matches if .zoo.<digits> has been found beforehand. Commented Nov 28, 2016 at 10:42
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    Now this a great answer! Commented Nov 28, 2016 at 10:43