matching text in quotes (newbie)

Question

I\'m getting totally lost in shell programming, mainly because every site I use offers different tool to do pattern matching. So my question is what tool to use to do simple pat

Answer 1

1.

zoul@naima:etc$ cat named.conf | grep zone
zone "." IN {
zone "localhost" IN {
    file "localhost.zone";
zone "0.0.127.in-addr.arpa" IN {

2.

zoul@naima:etc$ cat named.conf | grep ^zone
zone "." IN {
zone "localhost" IN {
zone "0.0.127.in-addr.arpa" IN {

3.

zoul@naima:etc$ cat named.conf | grep ^zone | sed 's/.*"\([^"]*\)".*/\1/'
.
localhost
0.0.127.in-addr.arpa

The regexp is .*"\([^"]*\)".*, which matches:

1. any number of any characters: .*
   • a quote: "
   • starts to remember for later: \(
   • any characters except quote: [^"]*
   • ends group to remember: \)
   • closing quote: "
   • and any number of characters: .*

When calling sed, the syntax is 's/what_to_match/what_to_replace_it_with/'. The single quotes are there to keep your regexp from being expanded by bash. When you “remember” something in the regexp using parens, you can recall it as \1, \2 etc. Fiddle with it for a while.