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bug#62272: Erroneous claim in grep man page


From: Paul Eggert
Subject: bug#62272: Erroneous claim in grep man page
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2023 00:29:49 -0700
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/102.8.0

On 2023-03-19 02:27, David Kra wrote:

TOBE: "Although the syntaxes differ, in GNU grep there is no difference in
available functionality between basic and extended syntaxes."

I'm not a fan of "syntaxes". Although it is a word in computer science it grates in my ear because in linguistics "syntax" is a field of study and there is only one syntax just as there is only one rhetoric and there is only one logic.

Anyway (to get off my soapbox :-) there's a bigger problem in the next sentence, which says, "In other implementations, basic regular expressions are less powerful." That's not true for POSIX BREs, as they have back-references, which POSIX EREs lack. (This is documented in the GNU grep manual's "Problematic Expressions" section.) And I doubt whether it's true that PCRE2 is a strict superset of EREs so we should scale the wording back a bit there too.

I installed the attached doc patch, which I hope fixes these problems. (It also fixes a couple of troff typos I noticed in the neighborhood.)

Attachment: 0001-doc-clarify-BRE-vs-ERE-bug-62272.patch
Description: Text Data


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