A Practical Guide to UNIX for Mac OS X Users

A Regular Expressions

In This Appendix

Characters

Delimiters

Simple Strings

Special Characters

Rules

Bracketing Expressions

The Replacement String

Extended Regular Expressions

A regular expression defines a set of one or more strings of characters. A simple string of characters is a regular expression that defines one string of characters: itself. A more complex regular expression uses letters, numbers, and special characters to define many different strings of characters. A regular expression is said to match any string it defines.

This appendix describes the regular expressions used by ed, vim, emacs, grep, awk, sed, and other utilities. The regular expressions used in shell ambiguous file references are different and are described in “Filename ...