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Regular expressions

Regular expressions

The title of this section may be unfamiliar to you, but if you have used the UnixWare system, you have almost certainly used regular expressions. Regular expressions are used to find files in a directory or text in a file. They may be made up of literal characters (like a search string in vi) or of a more complex pattern that can match several different possible combinations of characters. In essence, regular expressions describe the form rather than the content of a text string.

Rather than being the exact string of characters which are to be matched, a regular expression describes the character sequence. It is common for a regular expression to match more than one possible sequence of characters.

This topic explains the following:


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UnixWare 7 Release 7.1.4 - 22 April 2004