fails. The multiple-character regular expression a. (the character a followed by a period) uses the special
meaning of the period character to match the letter a followed by any single character. With this example, the
strings ab, a!, or a2 are all valid matches for the regular expression.
You can remove the special meaning of a special character by inserting a backslash before it. For example,
when the expression a\. is used in the command syntax, only the string a. will be matched.
Anchoring
You can match a regular expression pattern against the beginning or the end of the string by anchoring these
regular expressions to a portion of the string using the special characters.
This table lists the special characters that you can use for anchoring.
Table 10: Special Characters Used for Anchoring
DescriptionCharacter
Matches the beginning of the string.^
Matches the end of the string.$
For example, the regular expression ^con matches any string that starts with con, and sole$ matches any
string that ends with sole.
The ^ symbol can also be used to indicate the logical function "not" when used in a bracketed range. For
example, the expression [^abcd] indicates a range that matches any single letter, as long as it is not a, b,
c, or d.
Note
Searching and Filtering show Command Output
Often, the output from show commands can be lengthy and cumbersome. The Cisco NX-OS software provides
the means to search and filter the output so that you can easily locate information. The searching and filtering
options follow a pipe character (|) at the end of the show command. You can display the options using the
CLI context-sensitive help facility:
switch# show running-config | ?
cut Print selected parts of lines.
diff Show difference between current and previous invocation (creates temp files:
remove them with 'diff-clean' command and don't use it on commands with big
outputs, like 'show tech'!)
egrep Egrep - print lines matching a pattern
grep Grep - print lines matching a pattern
head Display first lines
human Output in human format
last Display last lines
less Filter for paging
no-more Turn-off pagination for command output
perl Use perl script to filter output
section Show lines that include the pattern as well as the subsequent lines that are
more indented than matching line
sed Stream Editor
Cisco Nexus 5500 Series NX-OS Fundamentals Configuration Guide, Release 7.x
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Understanding the Command-Line Interface
Anchoring