change in pattern matching in pager /usr/bin/less

[Wayne Davison]

On Sun, Sep 1, 2019 at 5:50 PM L A Walsh wrote:
> For some reason, the behavior of less has changed recently in regards to how
> it interprets characters like '\s' (whitespace).

Sadly, it's been compiled with POSIX regular expressions on Cygwin for
quite a while now. On Linux it is often compiled with GNU regex or
PCRE.

I started compiling my own version of less on Cygwin back in January
for this very reason. If you snag the source and run "./configure
--with-regex=pcre ; make" then you'll get a version of less.exe that
you can put somewhere early on your path (or in place of the stock
less.exe). You'll need the standard build tools installed (one way to
get those is to install cygport) plus some extra devel libraries, such
as libpcre-devel and libncurses-devel.

It would certainly be nice to have the PCRE regex as the standard in
the Cygwin version, though.

Running the Cygwin version:

$ /usr/bin/less --version
less 530 (POSIX regular expressions)
Copyright (C) 1984-2017  Mark Nudelman

Running my version:

$ less --version
less 530 (PCRE regular expressions)
Copyright (C) 1984-2017  Mark Nudelman

..wayne..

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