Re: grep bug report: --only-matching fails

[Tony Abou-Assaleh]

> But in a sense the -o and the * are conflicting: the [1234567890]*
> will match anything, also zero digits, and the -o should then print
> all these occurrences of zero digits...

grep-5.2.3 does not print empty matches when -o is specified. This
behaviour sounds reasonable to me, even though it is inconsistent with
general matching:

--
% echo 'abc1234abc' | ./grep  'z*'
abc1234abc
% echo 'abc1234abc' | ./grep -o 'z*'
%
--

As you can see, the same pattern produced a match without options, and
didn't produce any matches with -o. It is not clear to me at this point
weather to treat this as a bug or a feature. One one hand, empty matches
are usually representative of errors in the pattern, and printing every
one of them with -o will clutter the output. On the other hand, this makes
the behaviour of -o radically different from without it, especially when
searching multiple files and expecting the names of the matching files to
be printed. What do others think?

Cheers,

TAA

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Tony Abou-Assaleh
Email:    address@hidden
Web site: http://tony.abou-assaleh.net
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