Regular Expression in Bash

Posted on Apr 28, 2019 in Computer Science

Things under legendu.net/outdated are outdated technologies that the author does not plan to update any more. Please look for better alternatives.

Fish Shell is preferred to Bash/Zsh. The following content is for Bash/Zsh only.

It is suggested that you use Python script instead of Shell script as much as possible. If you do have to stick with Shell script, you can use =~ for regular expression matching in Bash. This make Bash syntax extremely flexible and powerful. For example, you can match multiple strings using regular expression.

if [[ value =~ ^(v1|v2|v3)$ ]]; then
    ...
fi