grep

[Gerald S Stoller]

FreeBSD  4.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 4.3-RELEASE #0: Sat Apr 21 10:54:49 GMT 2001
address@hidden:/usr/src/sys/compile/GENERIC  i386

        Above is the  'uname -a'  from my machine.  Below is a script
illustrating
the problem.  I believe (according to my understanding of the  grep  man
page)
that the  grep  line output is correct but that the  grep -w  line output
is
incorrect, it should be just the first two lines of the  grep  output.
In  vi , if the cursor is on the first "(" of a string beginning with
"((",
the  w  movement command causes the cursor to move past the second "(",
so  vi  considers adjacent (open) parentheses to combine and form a word.
I found that adjacent punctuation characters (all the graphic characters
from
the keyboard except for the alphanumerics) also combine to form a word.

Script started on Thu Sep 18 16:59:58 2003
0-$ echo  "fgh( hkjh\nfgh(hkjh\nfgh((hkjh"  |  grep -w  "fgh("
fgh( hkjh
fgh((hkjh
0-$ echo  "fgh( hkjh\nfgh(hkjh\nfgh((hkjh"  |  grep  "fgh("
fgh( hkjh
fgh(hkjh
fgh((hkjh
0-$ ^D Script done on Thu Sep 18 17:01:14 2003


        In addition, in the  grep  command's pattern string, the  man  page
(in  FreeBSD ) says that the characters '?', '+', and '*' are
naturally metacharacters.  However, in practice I found that '+'
must have a preceding backlash to be viewed as a metacharacter.
In  egrep  use, though, I find how it views "+" & "\+" to be
reversed from their handling in  grep .  Do you really want such
inconsistent behavior?