Why would it print the colon?

Regex syntax and features vary between implementations. \d isn’t supported by BRE/ERE flavors.

GNU grep supports PCRE, so you can use grep -oP '/dev/loop\d' or grep -o '/dev/loop[0-9]' if you are matching only one digit character.

Thanks a lot for the feedback :)

Well, if you are comfortable with Python scripts, there’s not much reason to switch to awk. Unless perhaps you are equating awk to Python as scripting languages instead of CLI usage (like grep, sed, cut, etc) as my ebook focuses on. For example, if you have space separated columns of data, awk '{print $2}' will give you just the second column (no need to write a script when a simple one-liner will do). This of course also allows you to integrate with shell features (like globs).

As a practical example, I use awk to filter and process particular entries from financial data (which is in csv format). Just a case of easily arriving at a solution in a single line of code (which I then save it for future use).