Hi. Borden via Bug reports for GNU grep <[email protected]> wrote:
> To my experience, grep's character > classes are unique to grep. It's not covered in > https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/mastering-regular-expressions/0596528124/ > or > any of the online references I use - so I'm not sure how one can expect > me to find them "self explanatory." In fact, they're standardized by POSIX and are available in awk, sed, and most other programs that handle regular expressions. It's a problem if they're not mentioned in that O'Reilly book. You might like O'Reilly's "sed & awk" (co-authored by yours truly) which I think has a nice intro to regular expressions in general. > > And the man page is already too long, > > That's subjective. To me, documentation is the "right" length if I can > quickly find what I need to get the job done. I wrote the patch because > it will make grep easier for me to use, and I hope other people, too. This is an issue all we GNU maintainers face. Keeping things up to date in both the texinfo manual and the man page gets old after a while, so I understand where both sides are coming from. For gawk I've been trimming the man page content and adding links to the online manual. That might be the right thing here for grep. HTH, Arnold
