Paul Eggert wrote: > > This warning punishes a traditional habit, namely to backslash-escape > > a leading ASCII '-' character, so as to avoid it from being interpreted > > as an option. > > ... These days, although I would think 'grep -- PAT FILE' would work > everywhere
Yes, these days "grep -- PAT FILE" is one of the three common recommendations, but "grep '\-x' FILE" and "grep -e -x FILE" are the other ones. [1][2] > If we want to support "grep '\-PAT' FILE", we can do so in grep rather > than in dfa.c Yes, grep.c looks like the better place to do this handling, rather than dfa.c and/or regex.c. Because the command-line handling is done in grep.c. And maybe some people find it OK to get the "stray \ before -" warning for grep -e '\-x' FILE and to inhibit it only when the option -e or the marker '--' is not used? Bruno [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2427913/how-can-i-grep-for-a-string-that-begins-with-a-dash-hyphen [2] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/541488/how-do-i-use-grep-to-search-for-the-string-1