How to match “anything up until this sequence of characters” in a regular expression?

Question

Take this regular expression: /^[^abc]/. This will match any single character at the beginning of a string, except a, b, or c.

If you add a *

Answer 1

I believe you need subexpressions. If I remember right you can use the normal () brackets for subexpressions.

This part is From grep manual:

 Back References and Subexpressions
       The back-reference \n, where n is a single digit, matches the substring
       previously matched  by  the  nth  parenthesized  subexpression  of  the
       regular expression.

Do something like ^[^(abc)] should do the trick.