pcre grep

siffland has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I need some help with pcre grep, I am unsure if it is OK to post for help here, so please tell me if it is not.

Here is what i am trying to accomplish. I need to grep anything out of the /etc/passwd with a UID of 205 or greater and that does not start with a - . The software we are using, cfengine, requires the use of a pcre. So far i have:

pcregrep -v ".*:.*:(-|1)?[0-9]{1,2}:.*:.*:.*" /etc/passwd
[download]

But that yields anything above 200, any help would be appreciated.

If anyone know any great webpages for pcre grep I would love to be pointed that direction. I am not that great with perl regular expressions, but would like to learn more.

Thanks,

Sean

Comment on pcre grep Download Code

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Re: pcre grep by duelafn (Parson) on Jun 10, 2010 at 14:42 UTC
Well, perl can do this easily enough: `perl -naF: -e 'print if $F[2] >= 205' /etc/passwd` See documentation for -a in perlrun Good Day, Dean	[reply] [d/l]
Re: pcre grep by linuxer (Curate) on Jun 10, 2010 at 20:43 UTC
I think, you could have a look at the official perldoc to get information about Perl's regular expressions: perlretut - Tutorial perlrequick - Quick Reference perlre - Regex documentation And not to forget the pcre man pages: http://www.pcre.org/pcre.txt If you want/have to stick to `pcregrep`, I suggest something like: `pcregrep -v "^[^:]:[^:]:-?(1?\d?\d\|20[0-4]):" /etc/passwd` [download] It (simplified) assumes/uses: the pattern is anchored at beginning of line (`^`) "login name" field must not contain a colon "password" field must not contain a colon "UID" field: leading optional "-" grouped alternatives: number between 0 and 199 OR number between 200 and 204 don't care about the rest of the line	[reply] [d/l] [select]


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