18. Regular Expressions

. . . the intellectual activity associated with software development is largely one of gaining insight.
-- Stowe Boyd

Table of Contents

18.1. A Brief Introduction to Regular Expressions
18.2. Globbing

To fully utilize the power of shell scripting, you need to master Regular Expressions. Certain commands and utilities commonly used in scripts, such as grep, expr, sed and awk, interpret and use REs. As of version 3, Bash has acquired its own RE-match operator: =~.