Linux regular expression-backslash

Linux regular expression-backslash

The metacharacter backslash (\) converts a metacharacter to a common character (and converts a common character to a metacharacter ). It forcibly interprets any metacharacters as common text to match the character itself. For example, a period (.) is a metacharacter. to match a period, you must use a backslash to escape it. The following regular expression matches the periods followed by three spaces.

\. □□□□

A backslash is often used to match a troff request or macro starting with a period.

\. Nf

You can also use the backslash to escape the backslash. For example, the font change request in troff is "\ f ". To search for rows containing this request, you can use the following regular expression:

\ F