What is the meaning of this test expression []?

I’ve seen someone use command:

 ps -ef | grep [h]ttpd 

and Output is:

apache   25125 31006  0 21:54 ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache   26869 31006  0 22:04 ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache   27349 31006  0 22:07 ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache   27696 31006  0 22:09 ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache   28534 31006  0 22:14 ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
root     31006     1  0 16:16 ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
apache   31011 31006  0 16:16 ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd

2 brackets surrounding the letter “h” where the grep to do?

Answers:

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Method 1

It’s a trick to prevent the grep command itself from appearing in the ps output.

[...] is a character class specification, i.e. [ab2] matches exactly one character that must be a, b or 2. [h] matches only exactly h.

The trick is that [h]ttp matches http, but it doesn’t match itself.


All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0

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