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Re: MAILDIR as test -d

2004-03-15 17:52:50
Toen ik Ruud H.G. van Tol kietelde, kwam er dit uit:

I don't see that yet. Is such an initial backslash 'ignored'?
(The log showed: Match on "\.")

An initial backslash means "end of leading whitespace," so if a magic or paramagical character follows it, the backslash doesn't change its behavior and the results are counterintuitive. To begin a procmailrc regexp with a literal period, you actually need to use

 \\.

which looks like "literal backslash and a character that isn't a newline" but isn't, so we write

 ()\.

which looks the same to both procmail and us.

Generally, the only time a leading backslash does what it appears to be doing is when the character it escapes is a space or a tab. Even then, an empty pair of parentheses does the job.

I'd say without exception that a procmailrc regexp that starts with a backslash

(1) looks right but is wrong;
(2) is right but looks wrong;
(3) is wrong and looks wrong too.


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