Using regex inside if clause in bash

Question

Look at this if block:

#!/bin/bash

str="m.m"
if [[ "${str}" =~ "m\.m" ]]; then
    echo "matched"
else
    echo "not matched"
    exit 1
fi

exit 0

This should print "matched", but it doesn't. Where am I going wrong?

Answer 1

You need to remove the quoting in the regex match.

if [[ ${str} =~ m\.m ]]; then

From the bash man page:

[...] An additional binary operator, =~, is available, with the same precedence as == and !=. When it is used, the string to the right of the operator is considered an extended regular expres‐ sion and matched accordingly (as in regex(3)). The return value is 0 if the string matches the pattern, and 1 otherwise. If the regular expression is syntactically incorrect, the conditional expression's return value is 2. If the shell option nocasematch is enabled, the match is performed without regard to the case of alphabetic characters. Any part of the pattern may be quoted to force it to be matched as a string.

So with the quotes, you're using good-old string matching.

If you need spaces in the pattern, just escape them:

str="m   m"
if [[ ${str} =~ m\ +m ]]; then