Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello All,

Learnt an example of Lazy match in Regex in Perl, so thought to share here.
Let's say following is Input_file.

Code:

cat Input_file
abcdtest123^ DUMMYtestabcd12234 DUMMY bla blabla12231311313blabla bla.....,,,,,bla
test132131 ^ DUMMY blabla1213 121313_ 131y7351eg1eub wdfwfknfidh28e7ty;;;

Now we would like to have data between first occurrence of ^ to DUMMY , then we could use Lazy match like as follows:

Code:

perl -pe 's|(\^.*?DUMMY\s+)(.*)| new_text_here.... \2|'  Input_file

Output will be as follows for mentioned sample:

Code:

abcdtest123 new_text_here.... bla blabla12231311313blabla bla.....,,,,,bla
test132131  new_text_here.... blabla1213 121313_ 131y7351eg1eub wdfwfknfidh28e7ty;;;

Why is Lazy match Good here? Because .* is a GREEDY match and matches anything till last occurrence of any mentioned character etc but using Lazy match .*?DUMMY\s+ it matches very first occurrence of string DUMMY followed with space starting from ^

Tested and written this in PERL, thought/views/improvements are most welcome here.

Thanks,
R. Singh