On Sun, Jun 27, 2004 at 12:57:12AM -0700, Professional Software
Engineering wrote:
I'm not going to argue the rest of the points: drastically changing
the syntax of procmail would be a VERY BAD THING.
I'm in agreement with Sean and David on this, though I think a
limited number of carefully considered things could be added if
done right. (I don't think that puts me out of agreement with Sean
or David on that score, either.)
The {n,m} regex matching that is part of the modern egrep standard
would be dang useful; but we've talked before about the problems
with backward compatibility. I didn't have a useful suggestion about
that before, so kept my mouth shut. A foray into gnu awk scripting
this last week provided me with a new idea, however.
In gnu awk, if you want to use {n,m} stuff you have to turn
on a flag explicitly: --re-interval. Here is from the man pages:
--re-interval
Enable the use of interval expressions in regular
expression matching (see Regular Expressions,
below). Interval expressions were not tradition
ally available in the AWK language. The POSIX
standard added them, to make awk and egrep consis
tent with each other. However, their use is likely
to break old AWK programs, so gawk only provides
them if they are requested with this option, or
when --posix is specified.
I like that idea: set a specific start-up option to use the new
syntax. We ought to be able to do that with {n,m} interval
expressions in procmail.
That and making the D flag work on the condition line like H and
B can, would be good augmentation without creating a new languge
for all intents and purposes.
Dallman
____________________________________________________________
procmail mailing list Procmail homepage: http://www.procmail.org/
procmail(_at_)lists(_dot_)RWTH-Aachen(_dot_)DE
http://MailMan.RWTH-Aachen.DE/mailman/listinfo/procmail