Hi, I am trying to match this word: hexagon-bx.mydomain.com with regex. I have tried this:

"[a-z0-9\-\[bu]\.*]*$"

What you proposed will match your requirement. But it will match almost anything else that does not have an upper case or punctuation char at the end. What do you want to discriminate it against? Pls post input and desired output, and the command that you want to run.

A regex that would do that can range from simple and broad to complicated and precise. It depends on the requirements. Let's start with simple:

^[a-z0-9.-]*$

^[/a-z0-9.-]*$

As Rudi says, we need to know how a regular expression is going to be used to be able to provide you with a regular expression that will match anything. If there is a file containing the strings:

hexagon-bx.mydomain.com
camera01
hexagon-bx/mydomain.com

echo expression

Thanks, Scrutinizer! I was actually trying to use if expr match "$xyz" "[a-z0-9.-] and the post you gave worked! $xyz was a variable assigned to hexagon-bu.mydomain.com. The only questions I now have is

1. Does expr match use regex differently than egrep?
2. Why do we not need to escape the period or the dash in the [z-a0-9.*] I am not sure why we would not need to escape these characters as I am relatively a newbie to regex.

Thanks for everyone's assistance and input!

No, expr and egrep do not use the same types of regular expression. Although some man pages aren't very clear about what form of regular expressions are used by expr match string pattern and expr string : pattern , the standards are clear:

       The  ':'  matching operator shall compare the string resulting from the
       evaluation of expr1 with the regular expression pattern resulting  from
       the  evaluation	of  expr2.  Regular  expression  syntax  shall be that
       defined in the Base Definitions volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001, Section
       9.3,  Basic  Regular Expressions, except that all patterns are anchored
       to the beginning of the string (that is, only sequences starting at the
       first character of a string are matched by the regular expression) and,
       therefore, it is unspecified whether '^' is a special character in that
       context.  Usually,  the	matching operator shall return a string repre-
       senting the number of characters matched ( '0'  on  failure).  Alterna-
       tively,	if the pattern contains at least one regular expression subex-
       pression "[\(...\)]" ,  the  string  corresponding  to  "\1"  shall  be
       returned.

Regular expression matching shall be based on text lines. Since a <newline> separates or
terminates patterns (see the −e and −f options below), regular expressions cannot contain a
<newline>. Similarly, since patterns are matched against individual lines (excluding the
terminating <newline> characters) of the input, there is no way for a pattern to match a
<newline> found in the input.

       -E     Match using extended regular  expressions.  Treat  each  pattern
	      specified as an ERE, as described in the Base Definitions volume
	      of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001, Section 9.4, Extended  Regular  Expres-
	      sions.   If any entire ERE pattern matches some part of an input
	      line excluding the terminating  <newline>,  the  line  shall  be
	      matched.	A null ERE shall match every line.