Need help using regex with apt-get

[learningcurb]

When I try to get all packages ending with 'webkit', I get this error.

$ sudo apt-get install *webkit
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Regex compilation error - Invalid preceding regular expression


However, if I put the * after webkit, like this, the regex works fine. What am I doing wrong?

$ sudo apt-get install webkit* -s

[Celauran]

$ sudo apt-get install .*webkit

[learningcurb]

Aha, that worked, thank you. :) Why is the .* is required though?

[Celauran]

. matches any character, * matches it any number of times. * alone, then, is meaningless -- match something any number of times, but not mentioning what that something is.

[learningcurb]

Aha, so * always to have a character before it to work. Thanks again. The Ubuntu forums are fantastic. :)

[learningcurb]

Hmm, I'm trying to use regexes to manage permissions now.


$ ls -la
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2009-06-05 13:03 .
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 2009-06-04 22:42 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 220 2009-06-04 22:39 .bash_logout
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 675 2009-06-04 22:39 .profile

$ sudo chown nobody *.*
chown: cannot access `*.*': No such file or directory
$ sudo chown nobody .*

$ ls -la
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 2 nobody root 4096 2009-06-05 13:03 .
drwxr-xr-x 7 nobody root 4096 2009-06-04 22:42 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody root 220 2009-06-04 22:39 .bash_logout
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody root 675 2009-06-04 22:39 .profile


It works okay except that I also changed the permissions of the parent folder by mistake. I guess I'll need to find a way to exclude .. from the regex.