How can I assign the match of my regular expression to a variable?

Question

I have a text file with various entries in it. Each entry is ended with line containing all asterisks.

I\'d like to use shell commands to parse this file and assign each

Answer 1

If you want to do it in Bash, you could do something like the following. It uses globbing instead of regexps (The extglob shell option enables extended pattern matching, so that we can match a line consisting only of asterisks.)

#!/bin/bash
shopt -s extglob
entry=""
while read line
do
    case $line in 
        +(\*))
            # do something with $entry here
            entry=""
            ;;
        *)
            entry="$entry$line
"
            ;;
    esac
done