On Wed, 11 Dec 1996 11:43:17 -0800 (PST), Chin Fang
<fangchin(_at_)jessica(_dot_)Stanford(_dot_)EDU> wrote:
* ^Subject:(.*\<)?PEN(\>|$)
This will trash mail with the subject having the word PEN, only as a
separate word, and only in uppercase.
If so, why the ? in the (.*\<)? is necessary? Also, the above man
The question mark makes the whole paren conditional. That is, an
arbitrary string ending in a \< character, or nothing at all.
Similarly, the second paren says, "[any string beginning with] a word
boundary, or else an immediate end of line ($)".
It bears pointing out that Procmail's notion of \< and \> is less
generic than egrep's, which actually matches these on the empty string
at the boundary of a word. Procmail's boundary matches only match on
actual characters, i.e. foo\> doesn't match a foo at the very end of a
line. Use foo(\>|$) as demonstrated above for that.
Hope this helps,
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