3. Regular Expressions

A regular expression is a pattern that describes a set of strings. Regular expressions are constructed analogously to arithmetic expressions, by using various operators to combine smaller expressions. grep understands three different versions of regular expression syntax: “basic,” (BRE) “extended” (ERE) and “perl”. In GNU grep, there is no difference in available functionality between basic and extended syntaxes. In other implementations, basic regular expressions are less powerful. The following description applies to extended regular expressions; differences for basic regular expressions are summarized afterwards. Perl regular expressions give additional functionality, and are documented in pcresyntax(3) and pcrepattern(3), but may not be available on every system.