Hi Colin That makes it way clearer now. So I am safe to assume that the regexes used in sed / grep et. al. are quite different from those encountered in automata theorie? For a DFA / NFA, regular languages and regexes describe the same stuff, and unless im mistaken Be sigma the alphabet conatining all characters allowed in a *nix file AND the {/} Sigma*/Name/(Sigma \ {/})(Sigma \ {/})* would match any string (emopty string included) over Sigma followed by /Name/ followed by at least one (or up to infinitley) many letters in Sigma except the {/}
> No, you misunderstand. Your regular expression matches "/Name/" followed > by one or more non-/ characters. It says nothing about what is allowed > to follow those non-/ characters. If you want the non-/ characters to > extend until the end of the line - that is, you want no / characters > until the end of the line - you *must* anchor the regular expression > using a final $. ... > You've definitely misunderstood how unanchored regular expressions work. > In general, tools that handle regular expressions do *not* require them > to match all the input, so your "state invalid" actually means "we ran > off the end of the regular expression before we ran out of input, but > that's OK". So in fact it (my regex) is taken as .*/Name/[^/][^/]*.* (note the additional .*) as long as I don't and quite clearly say it has to stop, i. e. add an anchor. Thanks for the help Axel Schlicht -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]