CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexbashregex-greedy
mathisfun1234
mathisfun1234

Reputation: 71

Regex Stop at the First Occurrence of a Word

How would I change my Regex to stop after the first match of the word?

My text is:

-rwxr--r-- 1 bob123 bob123 0 Nov 10 22:48 /path/for/bob123/dir/to/file.txt

There is a variable called owner, the first arg from cmd:

owner=$1

My regex is: ^.*${owner}

My match ends up being:

-rwxr--r-- 1 bob123 bob123 0 Nov 10 22:48 /path/for/bob123

But I only want it to be: -rwxr--r-- 1 bob123.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 323

Answers (2)

Wiktor Stribiżew
Wiktor Stribiżew

Reputation: 627410

You do not need a regex here, use string manipulation and concatenation:

text='-rwxr--r-- 1 bob123 bob123 0 Nov 10 22:48 /path/for/bob123/dir/to/file.txt'
owner='bob123'
echo "${text%%$owner*}$owner"
# => -rwxr--r-- 1 bob123

See the online Bash demo.

The ${text%%$owner*} removes as much text as possible from the end of string (due to %%) up to and including the $owner, and - since the $owner text is removed - "...$owner" adds $owner back.

Upvotes: 0

Alexander Mashin
Alexander Mashin

Reputation: 4539

By adding a question mark: ^.*?${owner}. This will make the * quantifier non-greedy. But use -P option: grep -P to use Perl-compatible regular expression.

https://regex101.com/r/ThGpcq/1.

Upvotes: 0

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