Regular expressions

Regular expressions are a way to peek some elements following a specific syntax among a set of elements. They allow elements or files to be selected using an expression.

Regular expressions provided by pBat are based on those provided by cmd.exe. As such, they are considerably less flexible than state-of-the-art regular expressions like PCRE.

Syntax

Regular expressions follow the following syntax.

expresion

Where expression is made of any sequence of characters. Some characters have special meaning:

When * is used, pBat uses the shortest correspondence between the expression and the string to test. As an example the string atest_test does not match the expression u*test whereas it matches the expression u*_test.

It is possible to specify some kind of absurd combinations such as ?* or **, these are treated like a single *.

File search expressions

Regular expressions can be used to search files in directories. In this case, any directory delimiter (eg. ** or **/) is used to cut expression in smaller tokens, which are used to search files within the directory tree.

As an example, the following regular expression will be executed as described below.

my/regu*/expressi?n/*

A recursive mode is available for file search, in this case, all the tokens excepting the last one are used to find directories where the recursive search will take place. Then, pBat searches recursively for any file or directory matching the last token within the search directories.

If we consider the same expression:

my/regu*/expressi?n/*

Note

Currently pBat include no backtracking systems, meaning that it is always the most greedy possible. In addition, using cmd.exe the expression *.* is a bit specific because it basically means “only files”. This is not included inside windows thanks to the wide support of files attributes.

Compatibility

Almost compatible with cmd.exe.

Available since 0.7.2.

See also

DIR Command, List commands, Specification index