Pattern Matching

I found pattern matching in Bash extremely confusing, partly because there’s

1. globbing (described by man glob.7)
2. regexing (described by man regex.7) used in [[ $X =~ regex ]] and grep, sed, awk… with various dialects.

Furthermore, the pattern-list notation as in ?(pattern-list) in the manual don’t work by default, but require

shopt -s extglob

to be set at the top of the script.

riptutorial

Back-references and Subexpressions

The above links to a secion in the grep manual which I’ve not managed to find any working examples of.

A similar section appears in the sed manual which appears to be the better way of extracting subexpressions from text in files.

When wanting subexpressions from text stored in a Bash variable, using an array ${BASH_REMATCH[@]} automagically created whenever [[ $X =~ regex ]] is used strikes me as the easiest way to do this.

BASH_REMATCH

When you use the =~ operator to match a regular expression against a string, any captured groups (i.e., parenthesized subexpressions) are stored in the ${BASH_REMATCH[@]} array starting from index 1. The entire matched text is stored at index 0.