Matching the POSIX way means trying to match a null-terminated string starting at its first character. Once you've compiled a pattern into a pattern buffer (see section POSIX Regular Expression Compiling), you can ask the matcher to match that pattern against a string using:
int
regexec (const regex_t *preg, const char *string,
size_t nmatch, regmatch_t pmatch[], int eflags)
preg is the address of a pattern buffer for a compiled pattern. string is the string you want to match.
See section Using Byte Offsets, for an explanation of pmatch. If you
pass zero for nmatch or you compiled preg with the
compilation flag REG_NOSUB set, then regexec will ignore
pmatch; otherwise, you must allocate it to have at least
nmatch elements. regexec will record nmatch byte
offsets in pmatch, and set to @math{-1} any unused elements up to
@math{pmatch[nmatch] - 1}.
eflags specifies execution flags---namely, the two bits
REG_NOTBOL and REG_NOTEOL (defined in `regex.h'). If
you set REG_NOTBOL, then the match-beginning-of-line operator
(see section The Match-beginning-of-line Operator (^)) always fails to match.
This lets you match against pieces of a line, as you would need to if,
say, searching for repeated instances of a given pattern in a line; it
would work correctly for patterns both with and without
match-beginning-of-line operators. REG_NOTEOL works analogously
for the match-end-of-line operator (see section The Match-end-of-line Operator ($)); it exists for symmetry.
regexec tries to find a match for preg in string
according to the syntax in preg's syntax field.
(See section POSIX Regular Expression Compiling, for how to set it.) The
function returns zero if the compiled pattern matches string and
REG_NOMATCH (defined in `regex.h') if it doesn't.
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