Using regular expressions in Linux with grep

Question

I can't get this simple regular expression to work for matching emails:

'\w*(?:\.\w*)*@\w*(?:\.\w*)*\w\{2,5\}'

It should be working as I have tested it with regex pal and it works just fine. I think there's a problem with optional character class but I'm not sure.

Answer 1

You should use grep with perl regular expression (-P option) which supports lookahead assertions like (?: ). Also curly braces shouldn't be escaped.

Try:

grep -P '\w*(?:\.\w*)*@\w*(?:\.\w*)*\w{2,5}'

Since perl expressions are experimental feature in GNU grep you may want to change (?: ) to ( ) and user extended expressions (-E):

grep -E '\w*(\.\w*)*@\w*(\.\w*)*\w{2,5}'

Some of the extended expression implementations do not support curly braces { and }. For portability you can use basic regular expressions.

To use basic regular expressions escape ( and ) and leave also { and } escaped.

grep '\w*\(\.\w*\)*@\w*\(\.\w*\)*\w\{2,5\}'