I have a file.txt that contains the single line:
[MOVING] From [/source/foo.txt] to [/dest/bar.txt] I would like to find a regex that basically extract the third group inside a pair of square brackets []
expecting /dest/bar.txt
So far, I came up with:
$> cat file.txt | grep ".*From.*to.*" | grep -oP '(?<=to ).*$' | cut -d "[" -f 2 | cut -d "]" -f 1 which works but doesn't like an elegant solution at all. Does anyone have an idea on how to achieve that ?
grep -o '\[[^]]*\]$' file.txt | sed 's/\[//; s/\]//' This anchors the grep to the end of the line, then extracts the square brackets and desired text. The sed command strips off the brackets.
$ echo "$a" [MOVING] From [/source/foo.txt] to [/dest/bar.txt] $ echo "$a" |egrep -o '\[.[^ ]+\]$' [/dest/bar.txt] You can use cut to extract the part after the opening bracket you're interested in, and complete with sed to remove the part after the maching bracket.
cut -d '[' -f 3 | sed 's/].*//' Alternatively, you can do it in a single sed or awk command.
sed 's/^[^[]*\[\([^\]\)]*\][^[]*\[\([^\]\)]*\][^[]*\[\([^\]\)]*\].*$/\3/' gawk -F '(^|\\])[^[]*(\\[|$)' '{print $4}' awk '{split($0, a, "(^|\\])[^[]*(\\[|$)"); print a[4]}' In both awk commands, field 1 is empty because the first separator starts at the beginning of the string, so the third bracketed group is field 4.
