Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] writes:
"Ping Yin" [off-list ref] writes:
...
quoted
man grep says
In basic regular expressions the metacharacters ?, +, {, |, (, and )
lose their special meaning; instead use the backslashed versions \?,
\+, \{, \|, \(, and \).
Doen't it mean that '\|' is BRE ?
It just says unlike in ERE, these characters are not special in BRE; it
does not at all say using backslash like \?, \+, and \| makes them so.
And they are not. \(...\), \{m\}, \{m,\} and \{m,n\} are part of BRE, but
the two you used (\+ and \|) are not. GNU accept these two as extensions,
but other POSIX implementations may have troubles with them.
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/basedefs/xbd_chap09.html
Please be gentle to porters to non GNU systems. Either stay inside BRE
(which I think we have managed to do with our usage of grep) or explicitly
ask for ERE with "grep -E".
I think this would help people new to our codebase.
Also
Message-ID: [ref]
Subject: Re: [PATCH] git-filter-branch could be confused by similar names
Date: Fri, 04 Jan 2008 17:17:39 -0800
aka
http://article.gmane.org gmane.comp.version-control.git/69630
---
Documentation/CodingGuidelines | 12 ++++++++++++
1 files changed, 12 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
diff --git a/Documentation/CodingGuidelines b/Documentation/CodingGuidelines
index 3b042db..994eb91 100644
--- a/Documentation/CodingGuidelines
+++ b/Documentation/CodingGuidelines
@@ -53,6 +53,18 @@ For shell scripts specifically (not exhaustive):
- We do not write the noiseword "function" in front of shell
functions.
+ - As to use of grep, stick to a subset of BRE (namely, no \{m,n\},
+ [::], [==], nor [..]) for portability.
+
+ - We do not use \{m,n\};
+
+ - We do not use -E;
+
+ - We do not use ? nor + (which are \{0,1\} and \{1,\}
+ respectively in BRE) but that goes without saying as these
+ are ERE elements not BRE (note that \? and \+ are not even part
+ of BRE -- making them accessible from BRE is a GNU extension).
+
For C programs:
- We use tabs to indent, and interpret tabs as taking up to