Interactive less search with wildcards

Question

I'm using less to view a large file and I want to search for a pattern with wildcards — e.g., " x 1??" where ? is any character. Does less support that, and if so how would I do that interactively?

You may find this helpful: http://linux.about.com/library/cmd/blcmdl1_less.htm — Elder Geek, Apr 06 '15 at 15:42
Not quite a duplicate: I wasn't able to determine through previous searching that less search uses regex, so @jordanm has the answer. Could he post it as such? — feetwet, Apr 06 '15 at 23:20

score 11 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 06 '15 at 23:42

11

The search in less uses regular expressions. To accomplish the search you are looking for, simply replace the shell wildcard ? with ..

/x 1..

answered Apr 06 '15 at 23:42

jordanm

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Interactive less search with wildcards

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