procmail
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Re: Outmatched by MATCH

2002-08-28 01:21:38
On Tue, Aug 27, 2002 at 08:35:09AM -0700, Bart Schaefer wrote:

E.g., "ba+r\/foo" DOES match "baaaaaarfoo", so it is NOT correct to say
"i.e., the + has no effect".

   Ooh, err.., that is true, and that's a relief. It is the caveat
ensconced near the end of the procmailsc manpage, which convinced me
that procmail is always "stingy", except to the right of \/:


   CAVEATS
          Because this speeds up the search by an  order  of  magni­
          tude,  the  procmail internal egrep will always search for the
          leftmost shortest match, unless it is determining what to
          assign to MATCH, in which case it searches the leftmost
          longest match.  E.g. for the leftmost shortest  match,  by
          itself, the regular expression:
   ...

          .+     will always match one character (except newlines of
                 course).
<<<

   This seems to state, and reinforce by example, that procmail will
   "always" treat .+ as . except to the right of \/. This doesn't seem
   to differ in meaning, from my attempted condensation.

   While trying to elucidate some of this for myself, I triggered the
"Out of memory as I tried to allocate 134582620 bytes" error, and it
turned out to be due to several "VAR=|command" I'd used with my 3.22
procmail. (It had last occurred a month ago, without being noticed then,
so it's a curious phenomenon.)

   In the morning, I'll try again, with a clean slate. Then I can better
understand what will and won't work.

Regards,
Erik
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