Where is less search pattern reference

lessregular expression

Where can I find reference for less regex search patterns?

I want to search file with less using \d to find digits, but it does not seem to understand this wildcard. I tried to find a reference for less regex patterns, but could not find anything, not on man pages and not on the Internet.

Best Answer

less's man page says:

   /pattern
          Search forward in the file for the N-th line containing
          the pattern.  N defaults to 1.  The pattern is a regular
          expression, as recognized by the regular expression library
          supplied by your system.

so the accepted syntax may depend on your system. Off-hand, it seems to accept extended regular expressions on my Debian system, see regex(7), and Why does my regular expression work in X but not in Y?

\d is from Perl, and isn't supported by all regex engines. Use [0-9] or [[:digit:]] to match digits. (Their exact behaviour may depend on the locale.)

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