 | Chapter 6 |  |
| Chapter 6 | |
Contents:
Filenames Versus Patterns
Metacharacters, Listed by UNIX Program
Metacharacters
Examples of Searching
A number of UNIX 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 awk scripting language, and
the commands grep and egrep.
Text patterns (also called regular expressions)
contain normal characters mixed with
special characters (also called metacharacters).
This section presents the following topics:
Filenames versus patterns
List of metacharacters available to each program
Description of metacharacters
Examples
Metacharacters used in pattern matching are different from metacharacters used for filename expansion (see Sections 4 and 5). 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. The command:
$grep [A-Z]* chap[12]
could, for example, be interpreted by the shell as:
$grep Array.c Bug.c Comp.c chap1 chap2
and would then try to find the pattern Array.c in files
Bug.c, Comp.c, chap1, and chap2.
To bypass the shell and pass the special characters
to grep, use quotes:
$grep "[A-Z]*" chap[12]
Double quotes suffice in most cases, but single quotes are the safest bet.
(Note also that in pattern matching, ? matches zero or one instance of
a regular expression; in filename expansion, ? matches a single
character.)
|  | |
| 5.8 Invoking the Shell |  | 6.2 Metacharacters, Listed by UNIX Program |
