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Bash Regular Expressions

May 26, 2008  By Mitch Frazier
 in

When working with regular expressions in a shell script the norm is to use grep or sed or some other external command/program. Since version 3 of bash (released in 2004) there is another option: bash's built-in regular expression comparison operator "=~".

Bash's regular expression comparison operator takes a string on the left and an extended regular expression on the right. It returns 0 (success) if the regular expression matches the string, otherwise it returns 1 (failure).

In addition to doing simple matching, bash regular expressions support sub-patterns surrounded by parenthesis for capturing parts of the match. The matches are assigned to an array variable BASH_REMATCH. The entire match is assigned to BASH_REMATCH[0], the first sub-pattern is assigned to BASH_REMATCH[1], etc..

The following example script takes a regular expression as its first argument and one or more strings to match against. It then cycles through the strings and outputs the results of the match process: 

#!/bin.bash

if [[ $# -lt 2 ]]; then
    echo "Usage: $0 PATTERN STRINGS..."
    exit 1
fi
regex=$1
shift
echo "regex: $regex"
echo

while [[ $1 ]]
do
    if [[ $1 =~ $regex ]]; then
        echo "$1 matches"
        i=1
        n=${#BASH_REMATCH[*]}
        while [[ $i -lt $n ]]
        do
            echo "  capture[$i]: ${BASH_REMATCH[$i]}"
            let i++
        done
    else
        echo "$1 does not match"
    fi
    shift
done

Assuming the script is saved in "bashre.sh", the following sample shows its output: 

  # sh bashre.sh 'aa(b{2,3}[xyz])cc' aabbxcc aabbcc
  regex: aa(b{2,3}[xyz])cc

  aabbxcc matches
    capture[1]: bbx
  aabbcc does not match

______________________

Mitch Frazier is an Associate Editor for Linux Journal.

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bash-regular-expressions

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 06/17/2010 - 22:53.

if [[ $1 =~ $regex ]]; then
this is not working in Fedora Core 10, does anybody help ?

More Details

Mitch Frazier's picture
Submitted by Mitch Frazier on Fri, 06/18/2010 - 12:23.

What command line did you use to invoke the script? What version of bash did you use (bash --version)?

Mitch Frazier is an Associate Editor for Linux Journal.

\w is a word doesnt work in

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 05/27/2010 - 09:05.

\w is a word doesnt work in bash regexp ?

\w is not supposed to "work"

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 08/02/2010 - 21:55.

\w is a perl regex atom. bash uses POSIX extended regex instead.

man 7 regex for details

bash-regular-expressions

kenb's picture
Submitted by kenb (not verified) on Fri, 01/30/2009 - 14:28.

I wrote the suggested bash script and got the demonstrated result. However when I invoked:
sh bashre.sh 'aa(b{2,3}[xyz])cc' aabbxcc aabbcc aabbyccaabbbzcc
I expected to get two matches with the last parameter but I only got one. I'm surprised
that I'm the only one so what did I do wrong?
regex: aa(b{2,3}[xyz])cc

aabbxcc matches
capture[1]: bbx
aabbcc does not match
aabbyccaabbbzcc matches
capture[1]: bby

Substring matches

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 04/08/2010 - 16:56.

Your regular expression has only a single pair of parentheses, so you will not have more than one substring saved in BASH_REMATCH. If you had two pairs of parentheses in your regular expression, you could have two substrings saved in BASH_REMATCH, etc. Here's an example with three pairs of parentheses:

$ sh bashre.sh '((aa(b{2,3}[xyz])cc)+)' aabbxcc aabbcc aabbyccaabbbzcc
regex: ((aa(b{2,3}[xyz])cc)+)

aabbxcc matches
  capture[1]: aabbxcc
  capture[2]: aabbxcc
  capture[3]: bbx
aabbcc does not match
aabbyccaabbbzcc matches
  capture[1]: aabbyccaabbbzcc
  capture[2]: aabbbzcc
  capture[3]: bbbz

Bash doesn't appear to have a "global" pattern matching switch a la perl's //g option.

add color and better indentation to the output

Albert Bicchi's picture
Submitted by Albert Bicchi (not verified) on Mon, 07/07/2008 - 21:24. 

#!/bin/sh

if [[ $# -lt 2 ]]; then
    echo "Usage: regex PATTERN STRINGS..."
    exit 1
fi
regex=$1
shift
echo "regex: $regex"
echo

while [[ $1 ]]
do
    if [[ $1 =~ $regex ]]; then
        echo -e "\t\E[42;37m${1} - matches\E[33;0m"
        i=1
        n=${#BASH_REMATCH[*]}
        while [[ $i -lt $n ]]
        do
            echo -e "\t\t\E[43;37mcapture[$i]: ${BASH_REMATCH[$i]}\E[33;0m"
            let i++
        done
    else
        echo -e "\t\E[41;37m${1} - does not match\E[33;0m"
    fi
    shift
done

Is "(( $# < 2 ))" an

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 06/25/2008 - 14:06.

Is "(( $# < 2 ))" an alternative conditional expression for the line "[[ $# -lt 2 ]]"?

Could you discuss BASH expressions with [[]] (()) and their valid operators. It seems the -lt, -gt, -a,
etc, can be replaced with <, >, &&, etc, if used with (()) --- replacing [] with (()) (numeric) and [[]] (strings).

Thank you.

PS: The captcha is really hard to read. It would be nice it there was an option to generate a new one that could possible be read by a mere human.

Is "(( $# < 2 ))" an

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 06/25/2008 - 14:02.

Is "(( $# < 2 ))" an alternative conditional expression for the line "[[ $# -lt 2 ]]"?

Could you discuss BASH expressions with [[]] (()) and their valid operators. It seems the -lt, -gt, -a,
etc, can be replaced with <, >, &&, etc, if used with (()) --- replacing [] with (()) (numeric) and [[]] (strings).

Thank you.

That simple?!

Robert de Bock's picture
Submitted by Robert de Bock (not verified) on Wed, 05/28/2008 - 10:00.

My god, Bash sure is a great tool! Thanks for the information.

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