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

As long as someone is pointing out sed/awk, I'm going to point out that grep is redundant.

sed -ne '/^zone/{s/.*"\([^"]*\)".*/\1/;p}' /etc/bind/named.conf

This gives you what you're looking for without the quotes (move the quotes inside the parenthesis to keep them). In awk, it's even simpler with the quotes:

awk '/^zone/{print $2}' /etc/bind/named.conf

I try to avoid pipelines as much as possible (but not more). Remember, Don't pipe cat. It's not needed. And, insomuch as awk and sed duplicating grep's work, don't pipe grep, either. At least, not into sed or awk.

Personally, I'd probably have used perl. But that's because I probably would have done the rest of whatever you're doing in perl, making it a minor detail (and being able to slurp the whole file in and regex against everything simultaneously, ignoring \n's would be a bonus for cases where I don't control /etc/bind, such as on a shared webhost). But, if I were to do it in shell, one of the above two would be the way I'd approach it.