Solaris Naming Administration Guide

About Regular Expressions

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 13-7, below.

Table 13-7 Regular Expression Symbols


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.`