Re: regex confusion -- not matching; think it should?

[Greg Wooledge]

On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 02:39:14AM -0500, Dan Douglas wrote:
> > If you're writing a script in bash, you MUST NOT use the [a-z]
> > or [A-Z] ranges, or any other alphabetic ranges, unless you are
> > working in the POSIX locale.  If you use an alphabetic range in any
> > other locale, you invite disaster.
> 
> I can't reproduce this on a GNU system using en_US.UTF-8

Yes, *some* implementations go out of their way to try to make [a-z]
work in the "intuitive" way.  But if you want your script to be portable,
you can't rely on that.

> Are you saying this because certain implementations tend to behave
> this way, or because it's implied by the spec?

Because real computers behave in the way I demonstrated.  "imadev"
is the workstation sitting under my desk.  It's what I'm typing this
email on right now.  It runs HP-UX 10.20.

There are a very large number of old HP-UX 10.20 and 11.11 machines
in the world.

> I'd assume this has
> more to do with your C library than to do with Bash specifically.

True.