Re: grep (and other gnu-utils)

[Tom Lord]

   From: Peter Horst <address@hidden>

   Please, do not be alarmed if some of the tests failed.
   Report them to <address@hidden>,
   with the line number, the name of the file,
   and grep version number 'grep --version'.
   Make sure you have the word grep in the subject.

   Spencer bre test #16 failed


I eventually gave up on the Spencer tests and implemented a new test
suite for two reasons.  First, I found a number of bugs, common in
many implementations, but not detected by the Spencer tests.  Second,
at least as I recall -- it was a long time ago -- at least one of the
Spencer tests was wrong.

My tests are distributed in the Hackerlab C library, available at
www.regexps.com, and can be found in the file
"src/hackerlab/tests/rx-posix".  The files "=generic-test-regex.c" and
"posix-test-cases.h" are the relevant files and comments in the file
"DESC" explain how to use those to test any implementation of the
standard Posix entry points.  It is not necessary to compile the
library to use the tests.

Those tests themselves have one bug, very recently discovered: they
test for support for "[[:blank:]]" which it turns out that Posix
doesn't require.  Aside from that, they may produce some interesting
results for programs that use GNU regex, especially programs which use
subexpression positions (e.g. sed, not grep).

-t