10/3/23, 8:42 AM Linux Regular Expression Tutorial: Grep Regex Example

Linux Regular Expression Tutorial: Grep Regex

Example
By : Mary Brent Updated August 14, 2023

What are Linux Regular Expressions?

Linux Regular Expressions are special characters which help search data and
matching complex patterns. Regular expressions are shortened as ‘regexp’ or
‘regex’. They are used in many Linux programs like grep, bash, rename, sed, etc.

Table of Content:

Types of Regular expressions

For ease of understanding let us learn the different types of Regex one by one.

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Basic Regular expressions

Some of the commonly used commands with Regular expressions are tr, sed, vi and
grep. Listed below are some of the basic Regex.

Symbol Descriptions

. replaces any character

^ matches start of string

$ matches end of string

* matches up zero or more times the preceding character

\ Represent special characters

() Groups regular expressions

? Matches up exactly one character

Let’s see an example.

Execute cat sample to see contents of an existing file

Search for content containing letter ‘a’.

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10/3/23, 8:42 AM Linux Regular Expression Tutorial: Grep Regex Example

‘^‘ matches the start of a string. Let’s search for content that STARTS with a

Only lines that start with character are filtered. Lines which do not contain the
character ‘a’ at the start are ignored.

Let’s look into another example –

Select only those lines that end with t using $

Interval Regular expressions

These expressions tell us about the number of occurrences of a character in a
string. They are

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Expression Description

{n} Matches the preceding character appearing ‘n’ times exactly

Matches the preceding character appearing ‘n’ times but not more
{n,m}
than m

Matches the preceding character only when it appears ‘n’ times or

{n, }
more

Example:

Filter out all lines that contain character ‘p’

We want to check that the character ‘p’ appears exactly 2 times in a string one after
the other. For this the syntax would be:

cat sample | grep -E p\{2}

Note: You need to add -E with these regular expressions.

Extended regular expressions

These regular expressions contain combinations of more than one expression.
Some of them are:

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Expression Description

\+ Matches one or more occurrence of the previous character

\? Matches zero or one occurrence of the previous character

Example:

Searching for all characters ‘t’

Suppose we want to filter out lines where character ‘a’ precedes character ‘t’

We can use command like

cat sample|grep "a\+t"

Brace expansion
The syntax for brace expansion is either a sequence or a comma separated list of
items inside curly braces “{}”. The starting and ending items in a sequence are
separated by two periods “..”.

Some examples:

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10/3/23, 8:42 AM Linux Regular Expression Tutorial: Grep Regex Example

In the above examples, the echo command creates strings using the brace
expansion.

Summary:
Regular expressions are a set of characters used to check patterns in strings
They are also called ‘regexp’ and ‘regex’
It is important to learn regular expressions for writing scripts
Some basic regular expressions are:

Symbol Descriptions

. replaces any character

^ matches start of string

$ matches end of string

Some extended regular expressions are:

Expression Description

\+ Matches one or more occurrence of the previous character

\? Matches zero or one occurrence of the previous character

Some interval regular expressions are:

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Expression Description

{n} Matches the preceding character appearing ‘n’ times exactly

Matches the preceding character appearing ‘n’ times but not more
{n,m}
than m

Matches the preceding character only when it appears ‘n’ times or

{n, }
more

The brace expansion is used to generate strings. It helps in creating multiple

strings out of one.

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