UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I am quite knew to scripting and I am trying to get a regular expression to work to check that a user enters a valid version number such as 1 or 1.1 or 12.3 etc. I dont seem to be able to get it to work as it picks up versions such as 1.......2. I only want it to work with a single dot. Thanks.

Code:

while true
do
        print -- "Please enter the version number"
        read version
        if [[ "${version}" != "[0-9]*\.[0-9]*" ]]
                then
                print -- "Version is not a number"
        else
        break
        fi
done

Edit: You're using ksh (or zsh). Check if your version supports the =~ operator.

Try:

Code:

[[ $version =~ ^[0-9]*\.[0-9]*$ ]] || ...

Or:

Code:

echo $version | grep -q "^[0-9]*\.[0-9]\+$"
if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then
    echo "Version is a number"
else
    echo "Version is not a number"
fi

Thanks both, I havent tried your suggestions yet but is my regular expression correct or am I doing something wrong with my syntax.

I am using korn shell, I believe t88 version.

Your regular expression matches: zero or more occurrences of [0-9] followed by a literal dot ., followed by zero or more occurrences of [0-9].
The == / != operators in ksh don't support regular expressions, but only shell pattern matching.
As I already said, check if your ksh version supports the =~ operator (but I doubt, if it's really an x88 implementation).
You should also modify the pattern (if used as a regular expression) to restrict the matching (see the examples in the previous two posts).

If your shell doesn't support regular expressions, use grep, as balajesuri suggested (you may need to use > /dev/null
instead of -q with some grep implementations.

Thank you for explaining. If my shell doesnt support regular expressions why does some of the regular expression work in my code? The =~ didnt work by the way. I will try usng the grep example instead but how would I make a single dot optionally instead of mandatory, would it be \? after the dot?

Thanks

Give an example, please. They were most probably valid as shell patterns too.

To match zero or one . use .?.

EDIT: Correct, in a basic regular expression you should use \?.