Regular Expression Matches

$BASH_REMATCH is an array and contains the matched text snippets. ${BASH_REMATCH[0]} contains the complete match. The remaining elements, e.g. ${BASH_REMATCH[1]}, contain the portion which were matched by () subexpressions.

Links

• Bash manual

Examples

Print matches :

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text="name=value with spaces"
[[ $text =~ ^([a-z]+)=(.*)$ ]]
echo all: "${BASH_REMATCH[0]}"
echo name: "${BASH_REMATCH[1]}"
echo value: "${BASH_REMATCH[2]}"

Output:

all: name=value with spaces
name: name
value: value with spaces