Using regex to get mouse MAC address

Question

What would be the most handy way to grab the mouse's mac address from the following output:

~ ➜ bt-device --list
Added devices:
Logitech K811 (00:1F:20:EB:06:E0)
Plattan ADV Wireless (5C:EB:68:1F:D1:62)
Bluetooth Mouse M336/M337/M535 (34:88:5D:3F:1B:88)

Is there something shorter than this:

bt-device --list | grep Mouse | sed -e 's/^.*(\(.*\))$/\1/'
34:88:5D:3F:1B:88

I'm looking for a syntax like:

bt-device --list | grep Mouse | xyztool '(' ')'

Remove the grep and yours is as good a choice as the others. bt-device --list | sed -e 's/^.Mouse.((.*))$/\1/' you could set this as an alias or function in .bashrc if you use it frequently; or just export the regex as an env variable - thats pretty common for regexs for IP addresses, urls, etc. — Argonauts, May 16 '16 at 06:17

meuh · Accepted Answer · 2016-05-18T13:02:53.300

7

Use awk to match the line and split it into words separated by ( or ). Take the 2nd word $2, or preferably the next-to-last $(NF-1) if you might have parentheses in the device name:

awk -F '[()]' '/Mouse/{print $(NF-1)}'

edited May 18 '16 at 13:02

answered May 16 '16 at 06:04

meuh

51,383

@Jander That's a good point. I've updated the answer. thanks. – meuh May 16 '16 at 14:33
1

@TomFenech oops. I should have copied my test script instead of just editing the answer. Thanks. – meuh May 18 '16 at 13:05

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered May 16 '16 at 06:01

Using grep with PCRE (-P):

bt-device --list | grep -Po 'Mouse\s.*?\(\K[^)]+'

Mouse\s.*?\( will match Mouse in the line and then upto first (, \K will discard the match
[^)]+ will get us the desired portion i.e. characters upto the next )

Example:

$ cat file.txt
Added devices:
Logitech K811 (00:1F:20:EB:06:E0)
Plattan ADV Wireless (5C:EB:68:1F:D1:62)
Bluetooth Mouse M336/M337/M535 (34:88:5D:3F:1B:88)

$ grep -Po 'Mouse\s.*?\(\K[^)]+' file.txt
34:88:5D:3F:1B:88

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered May 16 '16 at 11:09

A few more choices:

Perl
```
$ bt-device --list | perl -lne 'print $1 if /Mouse.*$(.*)$/' file 
34:88:5D:3F:1B:88
```
In many tools that deal with regular expressions, parentheses (()) are used to capture the matched pattern in a way that can later be used. In Perl, the 1st such captured pattern is $1, the second $2 etc. Here, we are looking for a line that matches Mouse and then a string in parentheses. The contents of the parentheses are saved as $1 and are printed if the match was successful.
grep + cut + tr
```
$ bt-device --list grep Mouse | cut -d'(' -f2 | tr -d ')'
34:88:5D:3F:1B:88
```
Here, we use grep to find the relevant line(s), cut to print the second (-defined field (34:88:5D:3F:1B:88)) and tr to delete the trailing ).

Just for fun, here's a solution with join:

$ join -1 1 -2 2 -o 2.4 <(echo "Mouse (") <(bt-device --list) 2>/dev/null | tr -d '()'
34:88:5D:3F:1B:88

Using regex to get mouse MAC address

3 Answers3