Linux in a Nutshell, Fourth Edition

Chapter 9. Pattern Matching

A number of Linux text editing utilities let you search for (and, in some cases, change) text patterns rather than fixed strings. These utilities include the editing programs ed, ex, vi, and sed, the gawk scripting language, and the commands grep and egrep. Text patterns (also called regular expressions ) contain normal characters mixed with special characters (also called metacharacters ).

Perl’s regular expression support is so rich that it does not fit into this book; you can find a description in the O’Reilly books Mastering Regular Expressions, Perl in a Nutshell, Perl 5 Pocket Reference, or Programming Perl. The Emacs editor also provides regular expressions similar to those shown in this chapter.

ed and ex are hardly ever used as standalone, interactive editors nowadays. But ed can be found as a batch processor invoked from shell scripts, and ex commands are often invoked within vi through the colon (:) command. We use vi in this chapter to refer to the regular expression features supported by both vi and the ex editor on which it is based. sed and gawk are widely used in shell scripts and elsewhere as filters to alter text.

Filenames Versus Patterns

Metacharacters used in pattern matching are different from those used for filename expansion. When you issue a command on the command line, special characters are seen first by the shell, then by the program; therefore, unquoted metacharacters are interpreted by the shell for filename expansion. ...