Ralf Wildenhues <Ralf.Wildenhues <at> gmx.de> writes: > > rather than > 2 3 11 failed, 4 5 10 passed unexpectedly > > in the summary. I didn't bother fixing those variables which we do not > output; the question mark patterns are more, thus incur higher overhead.
Good explanation. Perhaps a comment would be in order as a followup patch? > > > Also, are '/*/' and > > '/?/' portable patterns in sed, since those are regex metacharacters, or > > do we need to play it safe and use '/\*/' and '/\?/'? > > The '*' is special and needs escaping, fixed now, and pushed. I have no > idea how I could have overlooked that, but it seems that GNU and BSD sed > do not interpret it as special when it's the first regex token. And that is correct, according to POSIX: http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap09.html "The asterisk shall be special except when used: ... As the first character of an entire BRE (after an initial '^', if any)" > '?' is > not special. Oh right - I should have done a bit more research before asking :). sed uses BRE, not ERE, so ? stands for itself (not to mention the autoconf manual already documents that \? in sed is not portable). I guess my question was more along the lines of whether /*/ and /\*/ are universally interpreted as the same BRE like POSIX requires, or whether there are buggy sed out there where /*/ is treated as a syntax error where you HAVE to use /\*/ for portability. -- Eric Blake
