Re: find (and friends) bug?

[Tom Lord]

   From: fabrice bauzac <address@hidden>

   On Sun, Mar 03, 2002 at 12:06:58PM -0800, Tom Lord wrote:
   > In other words, as far as Posix and the tools you mention are
   > concerned, there are essentially four syntaxes, not seven:

   >    Posix BRE               Posix BRE with GNU extensions
   >    Posix ERE               Posix ERE with GNU extensions

   You must be right; to make a list of regular expression syntaxes, I
   just looked at the #defines RE_SYNTAX_* in
   findutils/lib/posix/regex.h.


Hopefully.  It's a long-standing obsession.  As I said, I haven't
personally (recently) checked to see whether or not the tools you
mentioned are among those that state exceptions to the default syntax
-- though I wouldn't rely on the defines in "regex.h" to find out.

To the various GNU maintainers: last time I checked, I think it was in
2001, it appeared that many packages had copies of `regex.[ch]', that
all of these were labeled "GNU regex 0.12", and that they were not all
the same.  In fact I just double checked and they are different in (at
least):

        grep-2.4.2
        gawk-3.0.6
        sed-3.02.80

and I'd bet that none of those is the same as the one in glibc.

The practice of simply copying these files from package to package is
suboptimal.  There are some nice tool-based solutions to such
problems, but I'm wondering first of all if the maintainers agree with
me in recognizing that such problems exist.

Also, am I alone in thinking that accurately implementing Posix
regexps is a desirable goal for the GNU tools?

-t