System Administration Guide: Naming and Directory Services (NIS+)

About Regular Expressions in NIS+

Regular expressions are combinations of text and symbols that you can use to search for special configurations of column values. For example, the regular expression `Hello' searches for a value that begins with Hello. When using a regular expression in the command line, be sure to enclose it in quotes, since many of the regular expression symbols have special meaning to the Bourne and C shells. For example:

rootmaster% nisgrep -h greeting='Hello' phrases.doc.com.

The regular expression symbols are summarized in Table 19–7, below.

Table 19–7 Regular Expression Symbols in NIS+


Symbol	Description
`^string`	Find a value that begins with string.
`string` `$`	Find a value that ends with `string`.
.	Find a value that has a number characters equal to the number of periods.
`[chars]`	Find a value that contains any of the characters in the brackets.
`*expr`	Find a value that has zero or more matches of the expr.
`+`	Find something that appears one or more times.
`?`	Find any value.
`\'s-char'`	Find a special character, such as ? or $.
`x \| y`	Find a character that is either `x` or `y.`