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GNU shell utilities

5.4.1 String expressions

expr supports pattern matching and other string operators. These have lower precedence than both the numeric and relational operators (in the next sections).

`string : regex'

Perform pattern matching. The arguments are coerced to strings and the second is considered to be a (basic, a la GNU grep) regular expression, with a ^ implicitly prepended. The first argument is then matched against this regular expression.

If the match succeeds and regex uses `\(' and `\)', the : expression returns the part of string that matched the subexpression; otherwise, it returns the number of characters matched.

If the match fails, the : operator returns the null string if `\(' and `\)' are used in regex, otherwise 0.

Only the first `\( ... \)' pair is relevant to the return value; additional pairs are meaningful only for grouping the regular expression operators.

In the regular expression, \+, \?, and \| are operators which respectively match one or more, zero or one, or separate alternatives. SunOS and other expr's treat these as regular characters. (POSIX allows either behavior.) See section `Regular Expression Library' in Regex, for details of regular expression syntax. Some examples are in 5.4.4 Examples of using expr.

`match string regex'

An alternative way to do pattern matching. This is the same as `string : regex'.

`substr string position length'

Returns the substring of string beginning at position with length at most length. If either position or length is negative, zero, or non-numeric, returns the null string.

`index string charset'

Returns the first position in string where the first character in charset was found. If no character in charset is found in string, return 0.

`length string'

Returns the length of string.

`quote token'

Interpret token as a string, even if it is a keyword like match or an operator like /. This makes it possible to test expr length quote "$x" or expr quote "$x" : '.*/\(.\)' and have it do the right thing even if the value of $x happens to be (for example) / or index. This operator is a GNU extension. It is disabled when the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.

To make expr interpret keywords as strings, you must use the quote operator.