What we just wrote was a simple regular expression; a powerful construct that lets you match text against patterns. The s command is written on the form: s/REGEX/SUBSTITUTION/, where REGEX is the regular expression you want to search for, and SUBSTITUTION is the text you want to substitute matching text with.
Regular expressions are common and useful enough that it’s worthwhile to take some time to understand how they work. Let’s start by looking at the one we used above: /.*Disconnected from /. Regular expressions are usually (though not always) surrounded by /. Most ASCII characters just carry their normal meaning, but some characters have “special” matching behavior.
So, looking back at /.*Disconnected from /, we see that it matches any text that starts with any number of characters, followed by the literal string “Disconnected from ”. Which is what we wanted. But