Regular expressions don't work as expected in bash if-else block's condition - regex

Question

My pattern defined to match in if-else block is :
pat="17[0-1][0-9][0-9][0-9].AUG"
nln=""
In my script, I'm taking user input which needs to be matched against the pattern, which if doesn't match, appropriate error messages are to be shown. Pretty simple, but giving me a hard time though. My code block from the script is this:
echo "How many days' AUDIT Logs need to be searched?"
read days
echo "Enter file name(s)[For multiple files, one file per line]: "
for(( c = 0 ; c < $days ; c++))
do
read elements
if [[ $elements =~ $pat ]];
then
array[$c]="$elements"
elif [[ $elements =~ $nln ]];
then
echo "No file entered.Run script again. Exiting"
exit;
else
echo "Invalid filename entered: $elements.Run script again. Exiting"
exit;
fi
done
The format I want from the user for filenames to be entered is this:
170402.AUG
So basically yymmdd.AUG (where y-year,m-month,d-day), with trailing or leading spaces is fine. Anything other than that should throw "Invalid filename entered: $elements.Run script again. Exiting" message. Also I want to check if if it is a blank line with a "Enter" hit, it should give an error saying "No file entered.Run script again. Exiting"
However my code, even if I enter something like "xxx" as filename, which should be throwing "Invalid filename entered: $elements.Run script again. Exiting", is actually checking true against a blank line, and throwing "No file entered.Run script again. Exiting"
Need some help with handling the regular expressions' check with user input, as otherwise rest of my script works just fine.

Answer 1

I think as discussed in the comments you are confusing with the glob match and a regEx match, what you have defined as pat is a glob match which needs to be equated with the == operator as,
pat="17[0-1][0-9][0-9][0-9].AUG"
string="170402.AUG"
[[ $string == $pat ]] && printf "Match success\n"
The equivalent ~ match would be to something as
pat="17[[:digit:]]{4}\.AUG"
[[ $string =~ $pat ]] && printf "Match success\n"
As you can see the . in the regex syntax has been escaped to deprive of its special meaning ( to match any character) but just to use as a literal dot. The POSIX character class [[:digit:]] with a character count {4} allows you to match 4 digits followed by .AUG
And for the string empty check do as suggested by the comments from Cyrus, or by Benjamin.W
[[ $elements == "" ]]
(or)
[[ -z $elements ]]

Answer 2

I would not bug the user with how many days (who want count 15 days or like)? Also, why only one file per line? You should help the users, not bug them like microsoft...
For the start:
show_help() { cat <<'EOF'
bla bla....
EOF
}
show_files() { echo "${#files[#]} valid files entered: ${files[#]}"; }
while read -r -p 'files? (h-help)> ' line
do
case "$line" in
q) echo "quitting..." ; exit 0 ;;
h) show_help ; continue;;
'') (( ${#files} )) && show_files; continue ;;
l) show_files ; continue ;;
p) (( ${#files} )) && break || { echo "No files enterd.. quitting" ; exit 1; } ;; # go to processing
esac
# select (grep) the valid patterns from the entered line
# and append them into the array
# using the -P (if your grep know it) you can construct very complex regexes
files+=( $(grep -oP '17\d{4}.\w{3}' <<< "$line") )
done
echo "processing files ${files[#]}"
Using such logic you can build really powerful and user-friendly app. Also, you can use -e for the read enable the readline functions (cursor keys and like)...
But :) Consider just create a simple script, which accepts arguments. Without any dialogs and such. example:
myscript -h
same as above, or some longer help text
myscript 170402.AUG 170403.AUG 170404.AUG 170405.AUG
will do whatever it should do with the files. Main benefit, you could use globbing in the filenames, like
myscript 1704*
and so on...
And if you really want the dialog, it could show it when someone runs the script without any argument, e.g.:
myscript
will run in interactive mode...