I was trying to find negative numbers in a file. I found that the
following didn't work:

egrep -e '-[:digit:].[:digit:]' top.sta.rpt

but the following did work:

egrep -e '-[0-9].[0-9]' top.sta.rpt

According to the man page the first one should have worked, unless I'm
missing something which is highly possible.

muser@drone ~ $ cat top.sta.rpt
234
86
-2
57
-651
9743
832
-68732
-7873
muser@drone ~ $ egrep -e '-[[:digit:]].[[:digit:]]' top.sta.rpt
-651
-68732
-7873

  Note you'd still miss the -2 negative number, but this might be the
desired behaviour.

  Bye,

-bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS lustro 5.10 Generic_141414-01 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Blade-1000
-bash-3.00$ cat /etc/release
                       Solaris 10 5/09 s10s_u7wos_08 SPARC
           Copyright 2009 Sun Microsystems, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.
                        Use is subject to license terms.
                             Assembled 30 March 2009
-bash-3.00$ which egrep
/usr/xpg4/bin/egrep

/usr/bin/egrep doesn't do the job:

-bash-3.00$ /usr/bin/egrep -e '-[[:digit:]].[[:digit:]]' top.sta.rpt
-bash-3.00$/usr/bin/egrep -e '-[:digit:].[:digit:]' top.sta.rpt
-bash-3.00$

  Bye,