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Full Discussion: The asterisk in regex
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers The asterisk in regex Post 302649009 by sudon't on Wednesday 30th of May 2012 04:23:27 PM
Old 05-30-2012
The asterisk in regex

I know through (my very limited) experience that you can't use the asterisk alone in a regex, but I still don't quite understand why. After all, it should match 'any or no characters'. To my mind, '*grep' should match:

grep
egrep
fgrep

While '.*grep' should match

egrep
fgrep

...but not 'grep' because it seems like we are insisting upon a character in front of 'grep' with that dot. Yet that is clearly not the case. Can someone explain why this is so?
(Hope my use of 'grep' as the search term doesn't cause any confusion)
 
RE_COMP(3)						     Linux Programmer's Manual							RE_COMP(3)

NAME
re_comp, re_exec - BSD regex functions SYNOPSIS
#define _REGEX_RE_COMP #include <sys/types.h> #include <regex.h> char *re_comp(char *regex); int re_exec(char *string); DESCRIPTION
re_comp() is used to compile the null-terminated regular expression pointed to by regex. The compiled pattern occupies a static area, the pattern buffer, which is overwritten by subsequent use of re_comp(). If regex is NULL, no operation is performed and the pattern buffer's contents are not altered. re_exec() is used to assess whether the null-terminated string pointed to by string matches the previously compiled regex. RETURN VALUE
re_comp() returns NULL on successful compilation of regex otherwise it returns a pointer to an appropriate error message. re_exec() returns 1 for a successful match, zero for failure. CONFORMING TO
4.3BSD. NOTES
These functions are obsolete; the functions documented in regcomp(3) should be used instead. SEE ALSO
regcomp(3), regex(7), GNU regex manual COLOPHON
This page is part of release 3.25 of the Linux man-pages project. A description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/. GNU
1995-07-14 RE_COMP(3)
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