Comments on: Stand back, I know regular expressions

By: suy

suy — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 22:14:38 +0000

Not only apt supports regular expressions directly, but also aptitude has much nicer support for searches. I never ever had to grep the output from aptitude, specially because it’s impossible inside the (optional) GUI mode (and that’s the main reason for aptitude having such a powerful search method).

By: Mez

Mez — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:50:55 +0000

Sebastian, as that was the quickest thing to start with - before the expression was refined… yeah, stupid I know.. but, in my experience egrep is generally ungreedy

By: Mez

Mez — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:49:31 +0000

Eiki, I know I know, but sometimes, you just get lazy

By: ilmari

ilmari — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 16:32:42 +0000

I was going to point out that apt-cache takes regexps, but instead I’ll just mention the –names-only option, which you want in this case (it still searches provides as well as the package name itself, which is why util-linux shows up, as it Provides: schedutils).

By: Eike Herzbach

Eike Herzbach — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 11:19:37 +0000

Stand back, http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html#wc

By: Joe Smith

Joe Smith — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 07:57:10 +0000

I just picked up Mastering Regular Expressions (http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Regular-Expressions-Jeffrey-Friedl/dp/0596528124) for Christmas, and it’s already made my life a million times easier

By: Pistahh

Pistahh — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 07:13:58 +0000

instead of grep … | wc -l you can use grep -c …

Pistahh

By: Sebastian

Sebastian — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 06:15:18 +0000

I cannot resist: why ‘^.*’ in front?
How about this one:

apt-cache search ‘[^-]utils$’ | wc -l

By: Jeff Schroeder

Jeff Schroeder — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 02:38:47 +0000

You know regular expressions, but you don’t know that apt supports them!

I think my version is the prettiest:
apt-cache search ‘^.*[^-]utils$’ | wc -l