not all regex expressions work

[Warron S French]

Hi the following link 
http://www.gnu.org/software/grep/manual/html_node/Character-Classes-and-Bracket-Expressions.html
 
either has improper or misinforming information.


The regular expression used for matching all punctuation characters in a 
strings "[:punct:]" does not work on CentOS.  I don't know if it works on 
any other system, but it doesn't work on CentOS-6.2.

I had to do the following (and I wracked my brain for 2 days while working 
through other script writing,   [^0-9a-zA-Z] that's how I got a string 
match against characters like the following:
        ~ ` ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) - + / , .

It's silly I know, but I don't know exactly who to report this bug to, and 
unless you told me how to determine the version of grep I was using, I 
wouldn't know how to find out.


I was trying to write a shell script that makes, modifies and removes DN 
records from an LDAP DIT and in this particular case I needed it to 
enforce password criteria.  I was trying to check the number of special 
characters (as presented above) as part of that plan.

I finally, used the following:

grep -o "[^0-9a-zA-Z]" <<< ${PASS} | wc -l

It works with an adjustment, that seems to be required because it is 
always 1 short of the actual number of actual characters matching in the 
${PASS} string being checked, so I adjusted my integer comparison 
accordingly.





Warron French, MBA, SCSA