Linux Community Magazine

13 Features of Regular Expressions
Nov 12, 2010, 21 :35 UTC (0 Talkback[s]) (880 reads)

[ Thanks to Andrew Weber for this link. ]

"Following is a summary of some of the major features of regular expressions.

"1. Supported by Linux/UNIX Utilities
Most commands will support at least the basic aspects of regular expressions. What this means is that as a tool enhancement regular expressions have important implications are are worth your time in learning. Three major utilities demonstrate the importance of regular expressions.
a. grep ? a line parsing tool that is based on regular expressions
b. awk ? a filed parsing tool based on matching text and using regular expressions
c. sed ? a stream editor which facilitates the modification of text streams

"Experience with these three tools or utilities is critical in the building of shell scripts.

"2. Reduces Evaluation Times
Because the use of regular expressions provides the ability to perform multiple tasks at one time, regular expressions save time and resources on a server. Instead of performing many passes over the same text in order to achieve one goal at a time, you can achieve many goals using regular expressions."

Complete Story

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