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in reply to pcre grep

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

It (simplified) assumes/uses: