Chapter 12<P> Regular expressions
Regular expressions
The title of this section may be unfamiliar to you, but if you have
used the SCO OpenServer 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.