Greping text after match with slashes

grep -oP 'Motherboard P/N           :   \K.*'

Explanation:

• -o Print only matching part of the line
• -P Use Perl-compatible regex (PCRE) - this enables more advanced regex features
• \K Don't consider the preceding as part of the match.
• .* Match zero or more of any character (except a newline)

Why not using the pipeline mechanism with grep and sed in the following way:

grep "Motherboard P/N" souceFile | sed 's/^.*Motherboard\ P\/N\ \:\ //1'

where sourceFile is a file containing your text. Sed has the following regular expression:

• ^.* means: from the beginning of the line, any number of characters till

• Motherboard string with some more characters, which need a comment (below)

• \ character in front of special characters "escapes" them, so they are not interpreted by the shell or the command, but instead are used as plain characters: a space, slash and colon.

Or you could pipe the output of a command (like the useful sudo lshw)

sudo lshw | grep "Motherboard P/N" | sed 's/^.*Motherboard\ P\/N\ \:\ //1'

However, it's most likely that you will not find "Motherboard P/N : " text in the output of lshw, and the output of this example may be empty...

EDIT:

Or, as I see what you need from your comments, you could modify the regex slightly, to accommodate to "S/N" and "P/N" at the same time. Use a dot . in place of a character that varies between the source text lines. E.g.:

sed 's/^.*Motherboard\ P\/N\ \:\ //1'  # the initial version
sed 's/^.*Motherboard\ .\/N\ \:\ //1'  # dot instead of "P"

...the same for grep

Just use look-back with grep:

grep -argument '(?<=string_you_use_as_separator)what_you_are_looking_for' dir/file_to_be_grepd.txt

in this case regex would look like this:

(?<=:)\w*

the full grep command. use -o to neglect everything you don't need and -P for pearl regex. And i like to pipe it into sort just for good measure

grep -oP '(?<=:)\w*' file.txt | sort