Mac OS X Panther in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Chapter 22. Pattern Matching

A number of Unix text-processing 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, Emacs, 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 (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

When you issue a command on the command line, special characters are seen first by the shell, and then by the program; therefore, unquoted metacharacters are interpreted by the shell for filename expansion. The command:

$ grep [A-Z]* chap[12]

can, for example, be transformed by the shell into:

$ grep ...