I've been a *nix sysadmin for a decade, and I'm pretty good at it if I say so myself. But there has always been a gaping hole in my knowledge: regular expressions. Whenever I'm forced to write one to do a find/replace in vi, or to use on the command line... I just seize up. I look for the closest damn example I can find online, and copy/paste like a sissy.
I know regexes can help me. I encounter situations every couple of days where I'm aware of it. I end up using horrendous sets of greps and egreps in pipes to get around my defect. And you should see my bash scripts... :(
I want that to stop. R/sysadmin, can you teach me regular expressions in a way I can understand and remember?
[link] [6 comments]