"Timothy J. Luoma" <luomat(_at_)peak(_dot_)org> writes:
On Mon, 11 Aug 1997, Professional Software Engineering - Lists account wrote:
From man procmailrc:
"These regular expressions are completely compatible to the normal egrep(1)
extended regular expressions"
The docs are outdated.
The procmail egrep once was completely compat. but no longer is....
More precisely, egrep has moved while procmail has stayed the same. At
the time Stephen wrote procmail's regexp engine, it wasn't common
knowledge that POSIX regular expressions were going to be expanded to
include character class expressions (ala [[:space:]]) and the like. \s
and \w are perlisms that GNU grep has picked up and should *not* be
used by scripts or programs that intend to be portable beyond systems
with GNU utilities all over them.
Philip Guenther