regular expression match

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I am trying to match a similar line using grep with regular expression

the line is
/remote/mac/pbbbb/abc/def/hij/hop/include/abc/tif/element/test/testfiles/Office.cpp:57: const OfficeType& getType().get() const;

I just need to extract the bold characters using grep with regular expression.

I have been trying a couple of regex patterns, but dont seem to be getting it right.

Could you please help.

2

grep will grep for you the whole line where the pattern matches...

Try it with sed...

sed 's/\(.*\):.*/\1/'

Or awk...

awk -F: '{print $1}'
3

thanks for the answer

but the problem is i can have more than one lines continuously in the string.I just need to extract the whole filepath.

I was thinking of using grep -o in order to display just the matching pattern. Would this be possible ?

/remote/mac/pbbbb/abc/def/hij/hop/include/abc/tif/element/test/testfiles/Office.cpp:57: const OfficeType& getType().get() const;
/remote/mac/pbbbb/abc/def/hij/hop/include/abc/tif/element/test/testfiles/Office.cpp:57: const OfficeType& getType().get() const;

4

The above two commands will work for more than one line too.

5

if you have GNU grep,

grep -o '/remote/mac/pbbbb/abc/def/hij/hop/include/abc/tif/element/test/testfiles/Office.cpp' file
6

Indeed it works, Thanks for the reply.