Re: bug with grep 3.0.2 in cygwin 3.0.7

[Eliot Moss <moss@cs.umass.edu>]

On 8/30/2019 2:12 AM, Brian Inglis wrote:
> On 2019-08-29 19:42, Eliot Moss wrote:
>> On 8/29/2019 3:08 PM, Andrey Repin wrote:
>>>> I encounter some problem with grep option -E on cygwin 3.0.7
>>>> echo "a^b" | grep "a^b" #answer a^b ie it's OK
>>>> but
>>>> echo "a^b" | grep -E "a^b" #answer nothing " for me it's KO
>>> That's an expected result of an impossible constraint.
>>>> I have to backslash ^ to be OK like : grep -E 'a\^b'
>>> Yes.
>>>> Is-it a bug ?
>>> No.
>>>> I don't know if all versions of cygwin and grep are concerned.
>>> RTFM, this is regexp basics.
>> There was a really great answer to this earlier.  I tried an
>> answer, but was wrong.  One has to read the "fine print" really
>> carefully.  At first I thought it was a bug, at least in the
>> documentation, but the meaning of a^b, when ^ is the metacharacter,
>> is kind of subtle (IMO at least).  It's easy to miss that
>> subtlety and think that if ^ is not at the beginning of an
>> expression it will be treated as an ordinary character ...
>> But my main point is that RTM would be enough; RTFM seemed
>> to me perhaps a little more rude than necessary.
> 
> https://cygwin.com/acronyms/#RTFM exists and has been amusing rather than rude
> in our industry for decades, especially in non-native English locales e.g. here
> in this list: "Read The Fine Manual"; but RTM for software products is usually
> "Release To Manufacturing", from the days when media was produced!

Ok, I relent!  E

--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple