3.6 Basic vs Extended Regular Expressions

In basic regular expressions the meta-characters ‘?’, ‘+’, ‘{’, ‘|’, ‘(’, and ‘)’ lose their special meaning; instead use the backslashed versions ‘\?’, ‘\+’, ‘\{’, ‘\|’, ‘\(’, and ‘\)’.

Traditional egrep did not support the ‘{’ meta-character, and some egrep implementations support ‘\{’ instead, so portable scripts should avoid ‘{’ in ‘grep -E’ patterns and should use ‘[{]’ to match a literal ‘{’.

GNU grep -E attempts to support traditional usage by assuming that ‘{’ is not special if it would be the start of an invalid interval specification. For example, the command ‘grep -E '{1'’ searches for the two-character string ‘{1’ instead of reporting a syntax error in the regular expression. POSIX allows this behavior as an extension, but portable scripts should avoid it.