James Youngman wrote: > I understand that "locate -r" works differently between GNU locate on > the one hand, and both mlocate and slocate on the other. GNU > locate uses Emacs-dialect regular expressions. Both mlocate and > slocate use POSIX BREs.
That does seem to be a gratuitous difference. > Anyway, on the one hand this divergence of interpretation of regular > expressions is unlikely to be convenient for users, but on the other I > believe it should be possible for tools to correctly handle white > space, even newlines, in file names. As the community of users of > GNU locate, what are your preferences? I think in the case of regular expressions that the "standard is better than better" rule should apply. I vote for using POSIX standard BREs for GNU locate. Then all of the knowledge and documentation regarding standard BREs are applicable. As far as handling newlines I think it would make sense to have '.' match embedded newline characters. Bob
