On Thu, Aug 15, 2002 at 10:47:39PM -0500, David W. Tamkin wrote:
Cat continued,
| Is there any chance of procmail getting the {n,m} regexp construct?
If it ever does, it will have to be of the form \{n,m\} so as not to break any
current recipes where unsescaped braces are in regexps are to be taken
literally. So technically, it may have that function some day but it will
never have that construct.
David,
The procmail manpage, while warning us not to become too excited by
the capabilities of modern implementations of egrep, does describe
procmail regexes under the heading "Extended regular expressions".
Can we still claim that procmail has EREs, if we will have to escape
{} ? My regex(7) manpage (on both RH and Debian) opines:
Obsolete (``basic'') regular expressions differ in several respects.
`|', `+', and `?' are ordinary characters and there is no equivalent
for their functionality. The delimiters for bounds are `\{' and
`\}', with `{' and `}' by themselves ordinary characters.
<<<
Other text processing tools, such as awk, modern egrep, perl, etc.
have {} as metacharacters. I don't suppose we can sell you the notion
that an X.0 release of nifty procmail could entail a behavioural change,
coincident with the introduction of bounds? (Well, it was worth a try.
:-)
Regards,
Erik
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