This document provides an overview of regular expressions (regex). It begins by stating that regex can help find patterns in text and briefly outlines the history of regex from mathematics to its introduction in Unix. It then explains that regex can be used as an alternative to shell wildcards and that many Unix tools incorporate regex. The document proceeds to list programming languages that use regex and provides some basic regex rules including matching single characters, character classes, quantifiers, and assertions. It provides examples to demonstrate matching patterns using these rules.