HP 3000 Manuals

System Debug Reference Manual

Metacharacters 

In order to express more general patterns than just literals, some
specific characters have been defined.  For example, the character "." as
a regular expression matches any single character.  The regular
expression "a.b" matches "a+b", "aZb", and similar strings.

The "." and other reserved characters are called metacharacters.  The
special meaning of any metacharacter can be turned off by preceding it
with the escape character "\".  Thus, "\." matches the literal period
character and "\\" matches the literal backslash.

Two positional metacharacters exist.  "^" matches the beginning of a
line:  "^HP" is a regular expression that matches "HP" only if it occurs
as the first two characters of the line.  Similarly, "$" matches the end
of a line:  "HP$" matches "HP" only if it is the last thing on a line.
Of course, these can work together:  "^HP$" matches a line that contains
only "HP".

MPE/iX 5.0 Documentation