Expr

expr
Example of expr command that does basic summation
Original authors	Dick Haight (AT&T Bell Laboratories)
Developers	Various open-source and commercial developers
Initial release	1979; 47 years ago (1979)
Operating system	Unix, Unix-like, IBM i
Platform	Cross-platform
Type	Command

expr is a shell command that evaluates an expression and outputs the result. It evaluates integer or string expressions, including pattern matching regular expressions. Comparison operators (equal, not equal, less than, etc.) apply to both integer and string values. Integer-specific operations include addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and modulus. String-specific operators include:

• matching a regular expression (match, or the colon syntax "str" : "reg" for an arbitrary string "str" and regular expression "reg")
• finding a set of characters in a string (index)
• finding a substring (substr)
• finding the length of a string (length)

Each symbol (operator, value, etc.) in the expression must be given as a separate parameter. A common challenge with using the command is preventing the shell from acting on input indented to be the expression as something other than expression.

Originally developed for Unix v7 and standardized by POSIX, the command is available on IBM i,^[1] and for Windows via UnxUtils.^[2][3]

Example

The following is a (non-POSIX-compliant) example involving Boolean expressions:

expr length  "abcdef"  "<"  5  "|"  15  -  4  ">"  8

This example outputs "1". This is because length "abcdef" is 6, which is not less than 5 (so the left side of the | returns zero). But 15 minus 4 is 11 and is greater than 8, so the right side is true, which makes the or true, so 1 is the result. The program exit status is zero for this example.

For pure arithmetic, it is often more convenient to use bc. For example:

echo "3 * 4 + 14 / 2" | bc

since it accepts the expression as a single argument.

Portability

For portable shell programming, use of the "index", "length", "match" and "substr" commands must be avoided; string matching remains possible but it must use the "string : regexp" syntax.

See also

• List of POSIX commands

References

1. IBM. "IBM System i Version 7.2 Programming Qshell" (PDF). IBM. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2020-09-18. Retrieved 2020-09-05.
2. "Port of the most important GNU utilities to Windows". Archived from the original on 2022-09-07. Retrieved 2026-02-03.
3. "Native Win32 ports of some GNU utilities". unxutils.sourceforge.net. Archived from the original on 2006-02-09. Retrieved 2026-02-03.

External links

• expr: evaluate arguments as an expression – Shell and Utilities Reference, The Single UNIX Specification, Version 5 from The Open Group
• expr invocation in GNU coreutils manual