a period means 'any single character'. A period followed by an asterisk means 'zero or more characters'.
Single-letter matching wild cards. Example: d?g could be dog, dig, or dug, but NOT dang, dragging, drug, dung, or digging.
The asterisk symbol means 0 to many repetitions of the expression it follows. This means the regular expression "do*g" would match "dg", "dog", "doog", "dooog", ... or "(?>do)*g" would match "g", "dog", "dodog", "dododog", ...
Regular expressions and context-free grammars are both formal languages used in computer science to describe patterns in strings. Regular expressions are simpler and more limited in their expressive power, while context-free grammars are more complex and can describe a wider range of patterns. Regular expressions can be converted into context-free grammars, but not all context-free grammars can be represented by regular expressions.
Regular expressions can be used to find patterns within data. Beyond that the subject of Regular expressions gets extremely complicated very fast, I suggest you purchase a book on the subject and read it... twice.. http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Regular-Expressions-Jeffrey-Friedl/dp/0596528124/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1345423498&sr=8-1&keywords=regular+expressions
to stop a sentence
Yes, Linux can be used on a mainframe.
Perimenopausal
Linux is the kernel.
red hat enterprise Linux is used as a server while red hat Linux is used as client..
I think it was the Linux kernel. There are many used with Linux now.
There is no limit to the number of terms that are used as expressions.
The very first one, period. The first shell for Unix didn't originally have a name but has since been referred to as the Thompson shell. The first shell ported to Linux was bash.