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Development Tools Console Foundations Environment and Redirection Find and Grep

What is a regular expression with GREP?

Video reference: https://teamtreehouse.com/library/console-foundations/environment-and-redirection/find-and-grep

Jim mentions that grep uses regular expressions, but I'm not clear what that means. Can someone enlighten me? Thanks!

1 Answer

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,269 Points

:point_right: Regular expressions are a symbolic notation for representing string patterns.

The concept of regular expressions exist in many languages as well as utilities like grep. Here's a pretty extensive wikipedia page on it.

There's also plenty of information around regarding the specifics of the regular expression implementation for grep, such as this one: Grep and Regular Expressions.