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Re: Interpretation of locate -r in various locate implementations
From: |
Bob Proulx |
Subject: |
Re: Interpretation of locate -r in various locate implementations |
Date: |
Sat, 5 Apr 2008 10:51:28 -0600 |
User-agent: |
Mutt/1.5.13 (2006-08-11) |
James Youngman wrote:
> I understand that "locate -r" works differently between GNU locate on
> the one hand, and both mlocate and slocate on the other. GNU
> locate uses Emacs-dialect regular expressions. Both mlocate and
> slocate use POSIX BREs.
That does seem to be a gratuitous difference.
> Anyway, on the one hand this divergence of interpretation of regular
> expressions is unlikely to be convenient for users, but on the other I
> believe it should be possible for tools to correctly handle white
> space, even newlines, in file names. As the community of users of
> GNU locate, what are your preferences?
I think in the case of regular expressions that the "standard is
better than better" rule should apply. I vote for using POSIX
standard BREs for GNU locate. Then all of the knowledge and
documentation regarding standard BREs are applicable.
As far as handling newlines I think it would make sense to have '.'
match embedded newline characters.
Bob