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Re: Man page - mistaken instructions?
From: |
Jim Meyering |
Subject: |
Re: Man page - mistaken instructions? |
Date: |
Wed, 05 Jan 2011 10:43:01 +0100 |
Eric Blake wrote:
> On 01/04/2011 08:45 AM, Fernando Basso wrote:
>> I'm Fernando Basso from Brazil, and I run Arch Linux.
>>
>> $ grep --version
>> grep (GNU grep) 2.7
>>
>> man help says:
>>
>> {,m} The preceding item is matched at most m times.
>
> POSIX only requires:
>
> When a BRE matching a single character, a subexpression, or a
> back-reference is followed by an interval expression of the format
> "\{m\}", "\{m,\}", or "\{m,n\}", together
>
> so {,m} might be useful as shorthand for {0,m}, but is certainly not a
> required repetition form. And given that it is currently rejected, you
> are correct that the documentation is buggy (or that we should add
> support for the shorthand as yet another GNU extension).
Thank you for the report.
I've fixed that with the patch below.
However, note that while grep does indeed reject \{,m\} as a BRE,
it does *not* reject {,m} as an ERE. However, as an ERE, it does not
work as documented, either:
$ echo aaa|grep -E 'a\{,3\}'
[Exit 1]
I haven't tried to deduce what it is intended to do, if anything.
>From 01c082a8724de018d5f8876864043df757ea35a8 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Jim Meyering <address@hidden>
Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2011 10:31:12 +0100
Subject: [PATCH] doc: remove erroneous "{,m}" item from grep man page
* doc/grep.in.1: Remove item describing bogus {,m} regex notation.
Reported by Fernando Basso.
---
THANKS | 1 +
doc/grep.in.1 | 5 -----
2 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)
diff --git a/THANKS b/THANKS
index 57b4ea0..8c3d0d9 100644
--- a/THANKS
+++ b/THANKS
@@ -26,6 +26,7 @@ Dmitry V. Levin <address@hidden>
Egmont Koblinger <address@hidden>
Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>
Eric Blake <address@hidden>
+Fernando Basso <address@hidden>
Florian La Roche <address@hidden>
Franc,ois Pinard <address@hidden>
Gerald Stoller <address@hidden>
diff --git a/doc/grep.in.1 b/doc/grep.in.1
index c981f26..e9b4589 100644
--- a/doc/grep.in.1
+++ b/doc/grep.in.1
@@ -746,11 +746,6 @@ The preceding item is matched
.I n
or more times.
.TP
-.BI {, m }
-The preceding item is matched at most
-.I m
-times.
-.TP
.BI { n , m }
The preceding item is matched at least
.I n
--
1.7.3.4