Hi,

I am trying to write a bash script that reads through a lot of xml like files and tries to extract certain values.

I am currently stuck trying to pipe the output from the files through egrep where I have three regex conditions that I would like to check for.

For example I want egrep to output the following values if encountered

<OTDataID>15364515
<OTName>IMG_2350.JPG
<OTDataSize>1200026

The three regex conditions

regexp1='<OTDataID>'[0-9]*
regexp2='<OTName>'.*
regexp3='<OTDataSize>'[0-9]*

For some reason no matter how I try to fomulate multiple conditions in egrep it fails with an error or does not return anything.

This works
egrep $regexp1

This fails as it interprets the "|" as a pipe
egrep $regexp1|$regexp2|$regexp3

These do not return anything
egrep -e '($regexp1|$regexp2|$regexp3)'
egrep -E '($regexp1|$regexp2|$regexp3)'

And neither does this

egrep {$regexp1,$regexp2,$regexp2}

returns:
egrep: <OTName>.*: No such file or directory
egrep: <OTName>.*: No such file or directory


This does not return anything:
egrep -E '{$regexp1,$regexp2,$regexp2}'


Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I don't know about egrep. But this should work with grep:

grep '<OTDataID>[0-9]\|<OTName>.\|<OTDataSize>[0-9]' your_xml_file

That did it. Thank you! I needed to escape the pipe from "|" to "\|"