[Bug 223524] whatis 'c++' fails with regex error

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https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=223524

            Bug ID: 223524
           Summary: whatis 'c++' fails with regex error
           Product: Base System
           Version: CURRENT
          Hardware: Any
                OS: Any
            Status: New
          Severity: Affects Only Me
          Priority: ---
         Component: bin
          Assignee: freebsd-bugs at FreeBSD.org
          Reporter: wosch at FreeBSD.org

The manual page of whatis(1) claims that the search is by default
“case-insensitive substring matching”

  By default, apropos searches for makewhatis(8) databases in the default
  paths stipulated by man(1) and uses case-insensitive substring matching
  (the = operator) over manual names and descriptions 

  whatis is a synonym for apropos -f.

     -f      Search for all words in expression in manual page names only.
             The search is case insensitive and matches whole words only.  In
             this mode, macro keys, comparison operators, and logical
             operators are not available.


But when I tried to search for the term “c++” I get an regcomp error:


$ whatis 'c++'
whatis: regcomp /[[:<:]]c++[[:>:]]/: repetition-operator operand invalid
whatis: ignoring trailing c++
usage: whatis [-afk] [-C file] [-M path] [-m path] [-O outkey] [-S arch]
              [-s section] name ...


Quoting the plus character returns zero results:

$ whatis 'c\+\+'
whatis: nothing appropriate


Using a single plus gives some results:

$ whatis 'c+'
c++filt(1) - decode C++ symbols

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