procmail
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Re: matching subjects with words in []

1997-01-25 15:38:01
"Philip" == Philip Guenther <guenther(_at_)gac(_dot_)edu> writes:

    Philip> Well, since you didn't show what condition you tried,
    Philip> there's no way to say what went wrong, or how it went
    Philip> wrong.

i hadn't even tried it yet with procmail.  i thought that since the
procmailrc manual says "The regular expressions are *completely*
compatible to the normal egrep extended regular expressions" the
results of my tests with egrep should be identical to what procmail
would do.  is this a bad assumption?  i ran egrep over an existing
mail file with

        egrep ^Subject:.*[[MAC]] foo

and got several matches, but got an error when i tried

        egrep ^Subject:.*([[MAC]]|[[ATARI]]) foo

(it must have thought i vas trying to pipe to a program named
"[[ATARI]])".)  wouldn't want this anyway, since [[MAC]] would also
match, for example, [C], right?

so i thought i was doing the right thing with:

        egrep ^Subject:.*\[MAC\] foo

and

        egrep ^Subject:.*(\[MAC\]|\[ATARI\]) foo

hmmmm...  these both gave error messages when i tried them on my linux
box earlier, but now they worked ok when i telneted into irix at school
(after i changed the () in the second one to "").

so i guess i have two questions at this point:

1.  what would be the correct syntax for procmail to match on more
    than one of these?  would (\[foo\]|\[bar\]) be what i'm looking
    for?  will give it a try...

2.  more generally, how far can one trust the correspondence between
    procmail and egrep?  to what extent can i use egrep as a test for
    what procmail will do before i trust it with my mail?

thanks,

-- 

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