HP-UX 11i System Administration Handbook and Toolkit, Second Edition

Expressions Are Strings and Wildcards

When using the programs in this book, such as grep and vi, you provide a regular expression that the program evaluates. The command will search for the pattern you supply. The pattern could be as simple as a string or it could include wildcards. The wildcards used by many programs are called meta-characters.

Table 26-Expr shows a list of meta-characters and the program(s) to which they apply. Only the programs covered in this book (awk, grep, sed, and vi) are shown in Table 26-Expr. These meta-characters may ...