Issue
I am trying to grep a pattern from files using egrep and regex without success.
What I need is to get a file with for example a convention name of:
xx_code_lastname_firstname_city.doc
The code should have at least 3 digits, the lastname and firstname and city can vary on size
I am trying the code below but it fails to achieve what I desire:
ls -1 | grep -E "[xx_][A-Za-z]{3,}[_][A-Za-z]{2,}[_][A-Za-z]{2,}[_][A-Za-z]{2,}[.][doc|pdf]"
That is trying to get the standard xx_ from the beggining, then any code that has at least 3 words and after that it must have another underscore, and so on. Could anybody help ?
Solution
Consider an extglob, as follows:
#!/bin/bash
shopt -s extglob # turn on extended globbing syntax
files=( xx_[[:alpha:]][[:alpha:]]+([[:alpha:]])_[[:alpha:]]+([[:alpha:]])_[[:alpha:]]+([[:alpha:]])_[[:alpha:]]+([[:alpha:]]).@(doc|docx|pdf) )
[[ -e ${files[0]} ]] || -L ${files[0]} ]] && printf '%s\n' "${files[@]}"
This works because
[[:alpha:]][[:alpha:]]+([[:alpha:]])
...matches any string of three or more alpha characters -- two of them explicitly, one of them with the +() one-or-more extglob syntax.
Similarly,
@(doc|docx|pdf)
...matches any of these three specific strings.
Answered By - Charles Duffy
