topic egrep question in Operating System - HP-UX

egrep question

Steve Edmunds_2 — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 11:09:06 GMT

Is this a bug with /usr/bin/egrep?

#echo aaa> a1.txt; echo "DR(aaa)" > b1.txt
#/usr/bin/egrep -w -f a1.txt b1.txt
#
Whereas:
# /opt/gnu/bin/egrep -w -f a1.txt b1.txt
DR(aaa)

as expected...

Re: egrep question

A. Clay Stephenson — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 11:51:20 GMT

A careful reading of the egrep man page (pay attention to the -w option) indicates that HP
got it wrong. Because the "()"'s are non word-constituent characters. I wouldn't trust quirks of egrep anyway and explicitly use a regular expression as a safer test.

Re: egrep question

Steve Edmunds_2 — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 11:55:30 GMT

Thanks, that does answer my question.