1.5, 1.7: Bash regex not recognizing word boundaries

[Allen Halsey]

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 3:30 PM, Eric Blake <ebb9@byu.net> wrote:
>
> Indeed - \b is a GNU extension available in glibc's regcomp(), but not
> required by POSIX nor available in newlib.  Unless/until someone
> contributes patches to write the same extensions to the POSIX interface,
> then bash won't be able to make use of those extensions.  One other option
> would be to ask the upstream bash project if the maintainer would be
> willing to pull in GNU regex.c on platforms where regcomp() is
> POSIX-compliant but lacks GNU extensions.  But it's unfortunately not on
> the top of my priority list.
>

I see, thank you.

After a more thorough search of the archives, I see the issue of
regcomp not recognizing '\b' as word boundaries came up before:

  http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2006-03/msg00362.htm

I was relying on the man page for egrep as my guide to regex syntax.

I'll now stick to the POSIX compliant subset [1]. If I find the need
for more powerful regex, I'll write the script in perl or python.

[1]: http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap09.html

Allen

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