DataScience Workbook / 05. Introduction to Programming / 2. Introduction to Bash Scripting / 2.2 Introduction to regular expressions in Unix
Introduction
Imagine, rather than typing all the file names, you could represent them with a single word. This word or a pattern used to represent files/directories are called regular expression (regex for short).
- Simple examples:
- to represent any word: eg. *.txt means all files with txt extension
- ? to represent a single letter: eg. ?????.txt matches all files with exactly 5 letters, with txt extension.
- ^ beginning and $ for the end of the word: eg ^text* forces the match for the beginning letters only.