Regular expressions are a means of matching a pattern of characters within a string.

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Escaping of meta characters in basic/extended posix regex strings in grep

Is it possible to escape all meta characters of a string inside a variable before passing it to grep? I know similar question has been asked before on SE (here) and also a good explanation here, but I ...
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759 views

How to block the Google Analytics Script using Privoxy

Related subject: Privoxy: blocking twitter, facebook and google outside of their domains + HTTPS Never mind what rule I am adding to the default.filter file, I don't make it to block these scripts. ...
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368 views

lookbehind and using it with grep in Vi?

Trying to get into Vi (not Vim), after learning Vim. Vim has a lookabehind like /\(Not this\)\@<!$, how to do it in Vi? If I want to search recurvively down directory in Vim, I could do :vimgrep ...
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328 views

Regex for phrase matching with case statement in ksh

I am trying to start or stop a service on AIX in ksh. I am trying to start to build in fool proofing for checking things like if the services is already down, etc. Here is my script #!/bin/ksh ...
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Regular expressions with ExpectJ

I've been used the ExpectJ Java library to automate some jobs on a Linux server, however now I need to automate a job that sends a different text response for each execution. Here is the output: Last ...
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57 views

Check some property for every line of a file

I have several (427 to be precise) text files with a million lines each containing 31 numbers separated be spaces (possible double spaces). However there might be some data corruption and there may be ...
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619 views

Print lines where first field has only four characters using regex in awk?

John Goldenrod:(916) 348-4278:250:100:175 Chet Main:(510) 548-5258:50:95:135 Tom Savage:(408) 926-3456:250:168:200 Elizabeth Stachelin:(916) 440-1763:175:75:300 output should contain the lines ...
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195 views

grep equivalent of the kwrite regex [A-Z][A-Z]+

So, it took me ages, but I finally learned to think in terms of regular expressions, thanks to using them in kwrite. But I still don't know how to translate that knowledge to grep. I love my grep, ...
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482 views

Difficulty making a regular expression to find at least 2 occurrences of a character in a file

I have a file containing random codes. Each code has ten characters in it, and I am trying to grep codes in the file that have at least 2 occurrences of a character. I am doing this: grep DD* ...
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132 views

Regular expression problem(s) in Bash: [^negate] doesn't seem to work

When I execute ls /directory | grep '[^term]' in Bash I get a regular listing, as if the grep command is ignored somehow. I tried the same thing with egrep, I tried to use it with double and single ...
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168 views

awk, sed, grep, perl… which to print out in this case?

I have this syntax in a file (http response times from analog): <thead><tr><th class="x">seconds</th><th class="R">reqs</th><th ...
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288 views

Weird zsh grep -P behaviour

I connect to server with PuTTY from Windows. I have a long yet not touched (I suppose) by hands of local admin config: $ cat /opt/jira/.subversion/config ... ### must be enabled, which is ...
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154 views

What does this egrep command do?

What does this egrep command do? egrep '[^A-M][0-9]+' /etc/passwd So far I think it searches for any file in /etc/passwd that starts with A-M and includes the number(s) 0-9. Is that right?
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88 views

Trying to remove all ids from an HTML file with grep

I'm trying to remove all id=" "s from an .html file but I'm not sure where I am going wrong. I tried using regular expressions but all I am getting is the .html file rendering in my Ubuntu terminal. ...
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83 views

Regex and piped commands with sed

I'm finding really hard to use sed command, plus I can't seem to find well written tutorials. Let me say that I worked with regular expression in other languages (Python, JavaScript, Java), so that ...
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47 views

Regular expressions help

what the different between these two regex expression ? AB\{4\} and (AB)\{4\} for the first expression I think that it repeat B 4 times, then for second expression it repeats AB 4 times. When I ...
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214 views

Using grep command and backreferencing

This is a pretty basic question, but I can't get my head around it. I'm learning Linux and one of the questions i've been given is; *The word sentimentalment includes the same three characters ...
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115 views

Match a simple Regex

I need to match this: (tt\d{1,10}) in a file with the file ending txt. I have tried grep and ack-grep but without results. ack-grep -G \.txt$ -g "(tt\d{1,10})"
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How to find and replace files contents that match a pattern?

Suppose we have a folder named Project. I would like find each file in the folder that contains the pattern &$ at the function call. For example should replace: AnyFunction(&$arg); with ...
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889 views

sed pattern matching

I recently asked someone at work about how to take the output of ipcs -qa and make it space delimited, so I can parse it/store it in the database for monitoring. He gave me this: ipcs -qa | sed 's/ [ ...
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1k views

Find all lines in a file with a certain character at a certain position

I have a lab question asking me to use grep with a regex pattern to match every word where the third letter from the beginning of the line is an "a" and save it with a redirect. How can I do that?
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278 views

pattern search and display the last occuring pattern?

I have a log file containing startup and shutdown times for everday. I want to see the last pattern pattern for startup and shutdown(which is located at the end of the file being updated everyday). ...
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143 views

Pattern matching from the input arguments

we're trying to enhance the scripts. Users will pass some arguments and part of the arguments will have 5.0.3 For an example the input argument would be like Jboss5.0.3GA. Since it ( Jboss5.0.3GA ) ...
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257 views

Compacting `find` name patterns

I am using find . -name '*.[cCHh][cC]' -exec grep -nHr "$1" {} ';' find . -name '*.[cCHh]' -exec grep -nHr "$1" {} ';' to search for a string in all files ending with .c, .C, .h, .H, .cc and .CC ...
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Stripping all vowels but the first from a set of strings

I have a string comprised of multiple substrings, separated by underscores. For example: AbcdAEfd_hEgdgE_AbAAAAA. I need to remove all vowels except the first from each substring. So: AbcdAEfd -> ...
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160 views

How do I generate a list of the characters occurring before a certain character only in lines that contain another certain character using regex?

I know that's super confusing (total noob-sorry!). To clarify, I have a text file that looks like this: 407-OL? 408-2-OL? 408-OL? 418-het? 420-1 and 2- OL? 429-2-left unscored? 430-2-left both ...
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156 views

Match neither regex

I have a Bash script which installs a customised JBoss. The name of the JBoss instance is checked against a regular expression to make sure that the name is valid: if [[ ! $1 =~ $instanceNameRegex ...
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802 views

Processing control characters

I have a log file which contains a bunch of non visible control characters such as hex \u0003. I would like to replace this using something like SED, but can't get the first part of the regex to ...
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120 views

Why is this Bash command using regex not replacing my brackets?

I have this command to go through all my files in my Music directory, and all subdirectories, and replace any square brackets in the file name with rounded brackets: find /home/Music/ -depth -name "* ...
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335 views

Replace text between brackets

I'm using awk '{ gsub(/BAR|WIBBLE/, "FOO"); print }' to replace text in data like: SOMETHING [BAR, WIBBLE] SOMETHING [BAR] This gives the desired result of: SOMETHING [FOO, FOO] SOMETHING [FOO] ...
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Replacing XML entity values with positive lookaround

I'm trying to do some pretty simple sedding of a file: sed 's:(?<=<Type>)default(?=</Type>):super:' < myfile.xml The concept's pretty simple, using positive lookaround, find the ...
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34 views

Trimming one part if equal to another part?

I use an e-mail quote attribution string like this: On dd mmm yyyy hh:mm +hhmm, from info@example.org (Example Dot Org): where info@example.org is the sender's e-mail address and Example Dot Org is ...
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60 views

Confused about word boundary

I have been researching this a lot, but I am still not clear on it. What does word boundary mean? What does it do? So, for example, could someone explain this command to me please? egrep ...
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100 views

grep: invalid content of \{\}

Here's the command : grep '\(2\)[[:digit:]]\{\1\}' numbers What I want is to match exactly 2 digits after the digit '2', 3 digits if I change the digit '2' to '3' in my expression, 4 digits if ... ...
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227 views

Find files in multiple folder names

I am trying to list all the files from dir1, dir2, dir3 and dir4 which might be anywhere in as a sub directory of my cwd using the find command. I tried the following with no success: find . -type f ...
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135 views

How can I find matches with sed (or similar) for configuration parameters?

I'm pretty good at using php's preg_match (and similar) commands, and I'm also pretty good with regular expressions, but I don't do very well with sed. I have two shell scripts I'm working on and I'd ...
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44 views

cclive: what kind of regexes are allowed?

Is there a place where I can look, what kind of regexes I can use with the --tr option from cclive?
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621 views

Match one part of a regular expression in a Kwrite find-and-replace regex

Among the joys of KDE, Kwrite is surely noteworthy. Having regular expression support built in by default into text editor is probably one of the top 10 best ideas of all time. Since I often need to ...
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204 views

How can I match this text in awk, printing line numbers for matches?

I have a text file thousands (roughly 148,000 lines long) that consists of a lot of sequences like this: b 29. b 52. c 84. c 83. c 94. c 93. c 61. b 38. c 81. c 92. c 28. c 37. c 27. ... and since ...
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460 views

How to treat a file as a single line with grep to apply a regexp search pattern?

I want to match everything that is between some lines with regexp but not this that match the start and the end. This sound to me as positive lookbehind and positive lookahead start text bla ...
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380 views

reference problem in using sed

I'm trying to use sed command to find/replace a pattern in file. It gives: sed: -e expression #1, char 27: invalid reference \1 on `s' command's RHS My command is: sed ...
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Regex : all greek letters with 5 unique letters (meaning that each letter only appears once)

Another one I can't seem to solve : all greek letters with 5 unique letters (meaning that each letter only appears once). my solution : egrep '(.)([^/1])([^/1/2])([^/1/2/3])([^/1/2/3/4])' greek.txt ...
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Matching hexadecimals with gawk

I have a binary file with the following content (printed in hexadecimal): $ xxd -p virus.com 5669727573b440bb0100b90500ba0000cd21 I can match the first 5 letters (which are the alphanumeric string ...
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linux + match IP ADDRESS with 3 octets or with 4 octets

how to match IP address with 4 octets or with 3 octets in one command? target - match xxx.xxx.xxx or xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx ( syntax should fit for Linux and Solaris ) how to merge the following commands ...
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Recursively edit files based on parent directory's name

I'm facing an issue I'm not quite sure how to overcome. I have a large directory with hundreds of folders, all following the naming scheme "a_b_x", with x being a random word. In every one of these ...
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447 views

Regular expression how to get value in shell script?

I have to write a shell script to get value from a string .. something like that : string="abcdef" pathName How can I use "grep" command with the use of regular expression to get "pathName" ? Thank ...
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275 views

Multiply certain numbers in a text -file by certain constant

I want an alternative solution to this jQuery hack, tasting a bit reinventing the wheel -- look I am sure I could do this with some one-liner using basic *ix tools. Look much easier and ...
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107 views

What special characters does grep parse by default? [duplicate]

Possible Duplicate: In a regular expression, which characters need escaping? I know there is the -E flag which treats the "search term" as a regular expression. However, it seems that even ...
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164 views

How to match group 1 in a regex followed by a 0 rather than matching group 10

In regex plugin of gedit, I use a regex to match/search and another for substitution. In the matching regex, I only have one group. In the substitution regex, I use \1 to refer to the group, and I ...
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In-place substitution for lines matching some pattern in a given set of files

Following on from my previous question: Remove slashes/parent paths from filenames inside CSS and Javascript content I arrived at the following command which replaces any filenames in these ...