You wish to capture the third colon$-$delimited field using a capture group in an extended regular expression. Each line of input contains nine such colon$-$delimited fields. Does the following regex behave as we expect? If not, why not?

$.*$:$/*$:$(.*)$:$.*$

We cannot use a regex in this particular case; a tool such as awk with customizable field separation is needed for this type of task

This will not work; we must rewrite the regex to contain all nine fields due to quantifier greediness

The "longest leftmost match" principle causes us to overmatch with the first $.*$

The given regex does operate as expected; there is no problem here