Shell Scripting: RegEx in if Statement

Question

I can't seem to figure out how to write a regex correctly in an if statement. I wanted it to print out all the lines with "End Date" in it.

NUMBERS contains a text file with the following content:

End Date    ABC ABC ABC ABC ABC ABC
05/15/13    2   7   1   1   4   5  
04/16/13    4   3   0   1   3   6  
03/17/13    6   9   3   8   5   9  
02/18/13    8   2   7   1   0   1  
01/19/13    1   9   2   2   5   2  
12/20/12    7   2   7   1   0   1 

Here is a snippet of my code that I am having problems with:

if [ -f $NUMBERS ]
then
        while read line
        do
                if [ $line = ^End ]
                then
                        echo "$line"
                else
                        echo "BROKEN!"
                        break                   
                fi
        done < $NUMBERS
else
        echo "===== $NUMBERS failed to read  ====="
fi

The output is:

Broken!

Answer 1

if you're using bash, try =~:

...
if [[ $line =~ ^End ]]

Note that the following will NOT work:1

if [[ "$line" =~ "^End" ]]

Answer 2

The portable solution is to use case which supports wildcards (glob wildcards; not actual regular expressions) out if the box. The syntax is slightly freaky, but you get used to it.

while read -r line; do
    case $line in
        End*) ... your stuff here 
            ... more your stuff here
            ;;   # double semicolon closes branch
    esac
done