egrep on the 3b1 is weird!
Kris A. Kugel
kak at hico2.UUCP
Sat Mar 23 19:07:21 AEST 1991
> > In article <1268 at hico2.UUCP> kak at hico2.UUCP (Kris A. Kugel) writes:
> > >Am I confused, or does egrep on the 3b1
> > >handle multiple regular expressions incorrectly?
> > >
> > > egrep 'foo|bar'
> > >
> > >seems to match '[fb][oa][or]' patterns,
>
> Now, I could see from this [manual] description that maybe the
> pattern I tried would match "fo[bo]ar", but that was NOT the
> behavior I remember seeing.
Well, evidently the problem is not as simple as I described it.
I'd used the "foo|bar" example as a substitute phrase for what
I was really trying. Bruce Lilly tried this literally with a
good sample file, and with this simple case egrep seems to work
correctly. And his test works correctly on my machine, too.
If I recall correctly, I saw the (I say) incorrect behavior
when I trying to find a newsarticle about some subject
(I didn't remember the title or group exactly, so
I had an "egrep -i "pat1|pat2|pat3|pat4|pat5|pat6|pat7|pat9"
kind of thing, probably running on stdin.)
I saw the malfunction, looked at a couple of (false match) lines,
and thought "these could be explained by . . ." without
doing a comprehensive check.
It sounds like I'm going to have to find a test case
showing this problem exactly, because it's CLEARLY not
the straightforward malfunction that I described in my
original article. (*sigh* when I get time . . . .)
I'd also conclude that I should have been more accurate
and complete about the conditions under which I saw the
problem, and presented the "[fb][oa][or]" explanation
as a hypothesis, rather than as the observed problem.
I'll try to be more accurate in the future.
Kris A. Kugel
( 908 ) 842-2707
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