Re: expr, regular expressions and '^' ...

[Jim Meyering]

aek@netcom.com (aekalman) wrote:
> Is there any way for me to suppress the implicitly prepended '^' in
> the regex? E.g. I have
>
> expr 'sfiaravrt-7s-sf' : '\(-7s\)'
>
> and it fails because -7s is not at the start of the string. How can I
> use expr (or something else entirely) to return what you would get if
> a '^' were not explicitly prepended, i.e. '-7s'?

Sure.  Prepend `.*'

  $ expr 'sfiaravrt-7s-sf' : '.*\(-7s\)'
  -7s