Lookbehind syntax to ignore quotes
-t -w -g london -s 'yesterday' -e 'yesterday' -f 100000"
-t -w -g london -s "yesterday" -e 'yesterday' -f 100000"
-t -w -g london -s yesterday -e yesterday -f 100000"
Task is to extract the word after "-s"
Command : grep -oP "(?<=-s \"|-s '|-s )[^'\" ]*"
Explanation
(?<= : is the syntax for lookbehind
s \"|-s '|-s : or condition to search the word after -s
[^'\" ] :
Output
yesterday
yesterdayyesterday
Command 2 : grep -oP -- '-s\s*\K([^ ]+)' file | tr -d \'\"