Bash script variable syntax

Question

I am new to bash scripting. I am trying to write a script which searches for a four letter/number string which has the form 'Jxxx' where x can be A-Z or 0-9. How do I represent this as a variable in bash? Thanks very much

You should read some regex tutorial. Your problem is typical regex search problem. e.g. grep 'J[0-9A-Z]\{3\}' file — Kent
– Kent, Commented Sep 13, 2018 at 9:06

l0b0 · Accepted Answer · 2018-09-13 09:41:33Z

1

Variables just contain static content in Bash - what you want is a regular expression, aka. "regex", which in your case would be simplest expressed as J[A-Z0-9][A-Z0-9][A-Z0-9]. You can use this with many programs to match text in files:

$ cat > my.txt << EOF
JAA
JAAA
JZ0Z
J00
foo
EOF
$ grep 'J[A-Z0-9][A-Z0-9][A-Z0-9]' my.txt
JAAA
JZ0Z

or filenames:

$ touch JAA JAAA JZ0Z J00 foo
$ find . -name 'J[A-Z0-9][A-Z0-9][A-Z0-9]'
./JZ0Z
./JAAA

answered Sep 13, 2018 at 9:41

l0b0

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