How can I use lookahead and lookbehind regular expressions on Linux using find?
I generally use the following command to match patterns
find . -maxdepth 1 -regextype posix-egrep -regex '.*/{pattern}'
However when I attempt to use a lookahead for example, no results are returned although it works when I use sites such as gSkinner
find . -maxdepth 1 -regextype posix-egrep -regex '.*/Linux(?=W).*'
What am I doing wrong?
find (both the GNU and BSD variants) do not support lookahead/lookbehind. GNU grep only supports the POSIX basic and extended regular expression variants as well as a couple of others.
Lookahead and lookbehind are Perl-style regular expression elements, so you'd have to use Perl directly, or GNU grep with the -P option, which then interprets Perl regex.
use the perl one-liner regex by passing the find output with a pipe. I used lookbehind (get src links in html) and lookahead for " and passed the output of curl (html) to it.
bash-3.2# curl stackoverflow.com | perl -0777 -ne '$a=1;while(m/(?<=src\=\")(.*)(?=\")/g){print "Match #".$a." "."$&\n";$a+=1;}'
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 239k 100 239k 0 0 1911k 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 1919k
Match #1 //ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.12.4/jquery.min.js
Match #2 //cdn.sstatic.net/Js/stub.en.js?v=fb6157e02696
Match #3 https://ssum-sec.casalemedia.com/usermatch?s=183712&cb=https%3A%2F%2Fengine.adzerk.net%2Fudb%2F22%2Fsync%2Fi.gif%3FpartnerId%3D1%26userId%3D
Match #4 //i.stack.imgur.com/817gJ.png" height="16" width="18" alt="" class="sponsor-tag-img">elasticsearch</a> <a href="/questions/tagged/elasticsearch-2.0" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'elasticsearch-2.0'" rel="tag">elasticsearch-2.0</a> <a href="/questions/tagged/elasticsearch-dsl" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'elasticsearch-dsl'" rel="tag
Match #5 //i.stack.imgur.com/817gJ.png" height="16" width="18" alt="" class="sponsor-tag-img">elasticsearch</a> <a href="/questions/tagged/sharding" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'sharding'" rel="tag">sharding</a> <a href="/questions/tagged/master" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'master'" rel="tag
Match #6 //i.stack.imgur.com/tKsDb.png" height="16" width="18" alt="" class="sponsor-tag-img">android</a> <a href="/questions/tagged/linux" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'linux'" rel="tag">linux</a> <a href="/questions/tagged/camera" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'camera'" rel="tag
Match #7 //i.stack.imgur.com/tKsDb.png" height="16" width="18" alt="" class="sponsor-tag-img">android</a> <a href="/questions/tagged/firebase" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'firebase'" rel="tag"><img src="//i.stack.imgur.com/5d55j.png" height="16" width="18" alt="" class="sponsor-tag-img">firebase</a> <a href="/questions/tagged/firebase-authentication" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'firebase-authentication'" rel="tag
Match #8 //i.stack.imgur.com/tKsDb.png" height="16" width="18" alt="" class="sponsor-tag-img">android</a> <a href="/questions/tagged/ios" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'ios'" rel="tag">ios</a> <a href="/questions/tagged/in-app-purchase" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'in-app-purchase'" rel="tag">in-app-purchase</a> <a href="/questions/tagged/piracy-protection" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'piracy-protection'" rel="tag
Match #9 //i.stack.imgur.com/tKsDb.png" height="16" width="18" alt="" class="sponsor-tag-img">android</a> <a href="/questions/tagged/unity3d" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'unity3d'" rel="tag">unity3d</a> <a href="/questions/tagged/vr" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged 'vr'" rel="tag
Match #10 http://pixel.quantserve.com/pixel/p-c1rF4kxgLUzNc.gif" alt="" class="dno
bash-3.2# date
Mon Oct 24 20:57:11 EDT 2016