Why ist the following regex working on cli but not from bash-script?

Question

The following command works on cli itself:

someCall prefix.+([[:digit:]]).postfix

But NOT in bash script.

The idea is that I want to give files with names like prefix.1.postfix oder prefix.112.postfix to the program.

What do I have to change in the script?

EDIT: forgot to mention the error it throws:

syntax error near unexpected token `('

EDIT 2: If I source the bash script with source myScript.sh then it works :-\

Jens · Accepted Answer · 2016-09-06 09:19:56Z

1

You seem to be confusing shell globbing and regex matching. These are different things and use different meta characters.

There is no way in (standard POSIX) globbing to express "one or more of this", as the regex + quantifier does.

However, you could try if this is selective enough:

$ touch prefix.1.postfix
$ echo prefix.[[:digit:]]*.postfix
prefix.1.postfix

answered Sep 6, 2016 at 9:19

Jens

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3 Comments

Michael Over a year ago

Oh, sorry, my wording was then wrong. So it's called globbing. Thx.

Michael Over a year ago

What I still do not get: The command in the initial question works now (see Edit 2). So is this now globbing or regex?

Jens Over a year ago

@Michael It's globbing if the shell does pathname expansion with it; it's regex when used as the argument to grep, egrep or other regex utilities. If I run a command like echo foo(bar)baz I get a syntax error both at the prompt, and when sourcing a file with that line. There's something you're not telling us.

heemayl · Accepted Answer · 2016-09-06 08:41:33Z

1

Put + after ([[:digit:]]) and escape .:

^prefix\.([[:digit:]])+\.postfix$

Also if you don't need the captured group of digits, do:

^prefix\.[[:digit:]]+\.postfix$

answered Sep 6, 2016 at 8:41

heemayl

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1 Comment

Michael Over a year ago

Does not help, still gives me the error mentioned in the question (sry, forgot that initially)

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