BASH regex help

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Apr 21, 2006 at 11:36:12AM -0400, Neil Watson wrote:
> I am trying to parse a string in BASH. I have two goals. First, exit if the
> string contains anything other than 0-9, a-z or '.'. Second escape all '.' 
> to
> '\.'.
> 
>        # Check for a proper url
>        if [[ $DOMAIN = [^a-b0-9\.] ]] ; then
>                echo "Invalid URL  a-b, 0-9 and . allowed only."
>                exit 1  
>        fi
> 
>        # We must escape special characters
>        $DOMAIN = ${DOMAIN//\./\\./}
        DOMAIN = ${DOMAIN//\./\\./}
> 
> 
> Alas, my code does not work as I had hoped. The first test always passes 
> even
> if DOMAIN contains other characters. The second test tries to open a file. 
> It
> returns the error "No such file or directory."

You wouldn't believe how many times I have made that mistake in bash. :)

Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml