Re: Portability problems of "Usual Tools" not described in manual

[Eric Blake]

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[adding bug-coreutils]

According to Russ Allbery on 3/17/2009 11:10 AM:
>>>      bash-3.1$ expr "X$baz" : 'X\(foo\)$' || echo baz
>>>      foo
>> I'm assuming this was from an older version of coreutils?  Can someone
>> determine 'expr --version' in the broken case, to see when it was fixed?
> 
> address@hidden:~$ expr "X$baz" : 'X\(foo\)$' || echo baz
> foo
> address@hidden:~$ expr --version
> expr (GNU coreutils) 5.97
> 
> address@hidden:~$ baz='foo
>> bar'
> address@hidden:~$ expr "X$baz" : 'X\(foo\)$' || echo baz
> 
> baz
> address@hidden:~$ expr --version
> expr (GNU coreutils) 6.10
> 
> There's no mention that I can find in the coreutils NEWS file, though, in
> a quick search for "expr".

I see it, although it is indirect, and looks like a side effect of a
related change for regex cleanup.  The news for 6.0 states:

  expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
  (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
  second "*" is ignored).  expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
  errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
  used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
  now checks for).

POSIX seems to be a bit ambiguous on this point.  It states that BRE
anchors exist to limit "matching strings that begin or end a line", so it
is not obvious whether the presence of a newline in the string parsed by
expr counts as two lines or one overall string.  But if most other
implementations treat the $ as the anchor only of the overall string, then
perhaps the coreutils NEWS item should be reworded to make it prominent
that this behavior change was intentional.

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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