My technology path has covered a fairly large swath of operating systems and user environments. I’ve gotten quite familiar with different line-command, GUI and full-screen text (3270) environments. I typically customize any environment I work with.

Currently as part of our missionary work, I’m a systems/network administrator in a small private school in France. I’m the only fish in the pond so I get to do everything. It also means I have to do everything. I don’t have the luxury, therefore, to get good at every technology that I work with. If I don’t know it, I have to teach myself, etc. No training budget here.

My background in programming in various environments and database administration in various environments serves me well in many situations. On thing continues to give me fits, however, regular expressions. These beasts are anything but regular! One thing they are, however, is ubiquitous! As a “mostly Windows guy”, I could get by without them, but even there, more and more pieces of software are adding regex capabilities into their find/replace functions. Add to that the fact that I maintain Linux servers (a self-taught area that has caused me no small amount of head-scratching!) and I absolutely cannot escape regular expressions.

As stated earlier, I don’t have the time to learn every good piece of technology that’s out there, nor a training budget…which translates to no tool budget either. So, I need a good piece of freeware/open source that “holds my hand” in the occasional, but deep, regular expression activity. There’s lots of freeware out there, but 90% of it is simply testing regex…not really helping you understand how to write them. I would search, in vain, occasionally for something that could help me.

Well, I finally found something!!!!

Regulazy (and its big brother Regulator) are written by Roy Osherove and can be found here: https://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/pages/tools-and-frameworks-by-roy-osherove.aspx I highly recommend them as ideal tools to help you build and test regex’s.

I resent the name Regulazy, but I love its facility to write for you the regex by stepping through a complex string and suggesting appropriate matching expressions for each part of it.

Anyway, thanks Roy for those great tools!!!! You’re helping busy sysadmins the world over!