Re: Interpretation of locate -r in various locate implementations

[Bob Proulx]

James Youngman wrote:
> I understand that "locate -r" works differently between GNU locate on
> the one hand, and both mlocate and slocate on the other.     GNU
> locate uses Emacs-dialect regular expressions.   Both mlocate and
> slocate use POSIX BREs.

That does seem to be a gratuitous difference.

> Anyway, on the one hand this divergence of interpretation of regular
> expressions is unlikely to be convenient for users, but on the other I
> believe it should be possible for tools to correctly handle white
> space, even newlines, in file names.    As the community of users of
> GNU locate, what are your preferences?

I think in the case of regular expressions that the "standard is
better than better" rule should apply.  I vote for using POSIX
standard BREs for GNU locate.  Then all of the knowledge and
documentation regarding standard BREs are applicable.

As far as handling newlines I think it would make sense to have '.'
match embedded newline characters.

Bob