UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

How can I test a string $email_addr for valid email address format such as the existence of @ sign or the period(.)

Thanks,
leo

\w+\@\w+\.\w+

this says.

\w = Match any "word" character (alphanumerics plus "_").

@ and "." are metachar so you need to backslash them to make them "normal".

now this version of regex is only good for emails like

john@doe.com

it will not work for addresses such as.

john.doe@doe.com
or
john@doe.unknown.com

or any variation of the above examples.
i gave you the ruff outline of how to validate a simple email adress now you can work on getting it much more robust and complex to suit your needs.

* try playing w/ the ? and ! regex operators.

Is this a perl question or a shell script question? If it is a shell script then you can use case...

Code:

case $email_addr in
  ???*@?*.??*) echo ok ;;
  *) echo bad  ;;
esac

where ? = any single char and * = any number of chars