Bash Regular Expressions

May 28, 2008, 09:45 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Mitch Frazier)

"When working with regular expressions in a shell script the norm is to use grep or sed or some other external command/program. Since version 3 of bash (released in 2004) there is another option: bash's built-in regular expression comparison operator '=~'.

"Bash's regular expression comparison operator takes a string on the left and an extended regular expression on the right. It returns 0 (success) if the regular expression matches the string, otherwise it returns 1 (failure)..."

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