Shell scripting and regex: Which one is better to match numbers, [[:digit:]] or [0-9]?

Question

As the title suggests, which one is better to match numbers, [[:digit:]] or [0-9]?

I'm using the bash shell

Thanks :)

Answer 1

The only reason that [[:digit:]] must be used is to support locales that use digits other than 0-9. For example Arabic-Indic Numerals: ٠١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩ (Unicode U+0660 through U+0669). Otherwise for the Hindu-Arabic numerals 0123456789, [0-9] works equally as well as [[:digit:]].

Answer 2

# time grep -oE '[[:digit:]]' /etc/services
...
real    0m0.029s
user    0m0.017s
sys     0m0.013s


# time grep -oE '[0-9]' /etc/services
...
real    0m0.029s
user    0m0.016s
sys     0m0.012s

I could probably write a quick script to average them, and I bet I'd find that the averages are identical, but it certainly gives you the idea.