CFT: BSD-licensed grep [Fwd: cvs commit: ports/textproc/bsdgrep Makefile distinfo]

[Doug Barton]

pfgshield-freebsd at yahoo.com wrote:
> On 2008-06-17, Gabor Kovesdan wrote:
>>> egrep: empty (sub)expression
>>> 
>> I've looked at this and I have a patch with a workaround: 
>> http://kovesdan.org/patches/grep.dougb.diff
> 
> This general behavior should be considered a GNUism, the type of
> thing that we want to avoid in scripts. Perhaps, if it's too
> common, the workaround should be ifdef'd into a GNU compatible mode
> or something.

No, "here is a new bsd grep, but change all your scripts that have 
relied on legitimate behavior of grep in the past" is a non-starter. I 
haven't checked POSIX to see whether the particular construction I am 
using fits the spec or not, but I really don't care. We need to be 
feature-compatible with the GNU versions of these tools, both for 
legacy scripts and also for those users migrating over from linux.

Doug

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