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

Customizing Attribute Searches

You can also use all the following in filter expressions in your search patterns.

Table 25–19 fnsearch Filter Expression Operators

Filter Expression Operator 

Symbols and Forms 

Logical operators 

or, and, not

Parentheses for grouping 

( )

Relational operators: Compare an attribute to a supplied value 

== True if at least one attribute value is equal to the supplied value. != True if none of the attribute values are equal to the supplied value. < True if at least one attribute value is less than the supplied value. <= True if at least one attribute value is less than or equal to the supplied value. > True if at least one attribute value is greater than the supplied value. >= True if at least one attribute value is greater than or equal to the supplied value. ~= True if at least one attribute value matches the supplied value according to some context-specific approximate matching criterion. This criterion must subsume strict equality.

Example: 

% fnsearch name "not (make == 'olds' and year == 1983)"

Substitution tokens: 

Helpful when writing shell scripts; allow the use of OSI OIDs and DCE UUIDs when used with the -O and -U options

%a for attribute

%s for string

%i for identifier

%v for attribute value (only fn_attr_syntax_ascii is currently supported)

Example: 

The following three examples are equivalent. 

% fnsearch name "color == 'red'"

% fnsearch name "%a == 'red'" color

% fnsearch name "%a == %s" color red

Wild card strings 

*, *string, string*, str*ing, %s*

Extended operators 

'name'(wildcarded_string), 'reftype'(identifier), 'addrtype' (identifier)

Example: 

Search for objects with names starting with "Bill" and IQ attributes over 80. 

% fnsearch name "'name'('bill'*) and IQ > 80"

See the fnsearch man page for detailed information about creating search patterns.