File: grep.info,  Node: Anchoring,  Next: Back-references and Subexpressions,  Prev: Special Backslash Expressions,  Up: Regular Expressions

3.4 Anchoring
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The caret ‘^’ and the dollar sign ‘$’ are special characters that
respectively match the empty string at the beginning and end of a line.
They are termed “anchors”, since they force the match to be "anchored"
to beginning or end of a line, respectively.