Bug in grep -i ?
Kent Black,L08,640,7754072
kab at reed.bitnet
Wed Dec 27 10:03:13 AEST 1989
In article <1989Dec25.210118.7946 at phri.nyu.edu> roy at alanine.phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes:
>
> Is there any reason, other than a bug, why the following two
>commands (extracted from a history list) should give different output?
>
> 122 15:51 grep -i 'N:.*SIRIUS' yalerem.txt
> 123 15:51 grep -i 'n:.*sirius' yalerem.txt
>
No.
Bsd derived bug that refused to go away until ~BSD4.[2-3]; I thought old
bsd-grep folded upper case in the pattern onto lower case, but not
lower to upper (but see below): e.g.,
$ grep -i KENT /reed/etc/passwd
kab:irAbYvOt4zBKQ:238:20:Kent Black,L08,640,:/u/v/kab:/bin/csh
$ grep -i kENT /reed/etc/passwd
$
$ grep -i KeNt /reed/etc/passwd
kab:irAbYvOt4zBKQ:238:20:Kent Black,L08,640,:/u/v/kab:/bin/csh
I fixed it on our vax and may have remembered backwards; patch is
trivial.
The bug is slowly being eradicated. Grep works as documented on at least
More BSD4.3 (VAX) (and, I presume, 4.3-tahoe)
SunOS 4.0 (Sun3/60)
Ultrix UWS2.0 (DECstation 3100)
Bug still exists for
BSD4.[1-2]
NeXT 1.0
(they actually reversed the behaviour, unless I've misremembered
nexttues> nidump passwd . | grep -i kent
kab:J5o2F5X1fbYAY:238:20:Kent Black:/u/kab:/bin/csh
nexttues> nidump passwd . | grep -i KENT
nexttues>
Now isn't that special ;-)
UTEK 4.0 (tek4317) (also reversed the behaviour)
Sales Pitch: (except that it isn't for sale)
Gnu grep (ggrep) has always been correct, besides which it is public
domain, much faster than 4.3-grep on our vax (pointless comparison for
any files I had handy on the 3100: lots of zero's ;-), has context printing
(lines before, after or both), emacs-style word matching and
6 g'zillion other neat things. Use it instead, if you can.
-- kab
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