On Wed, Nov 24, 1999 at 04:44:24PM +0100, Bruno Boettcher wrote: > Hello, > > when running dselect or apt i invariantly get hte same problem, the whole > system come to halt with the following error: > Need to get 0B/576kB of archives. After unpacking 1644kB will be used. > Sequence (?-...) not recognized at /usr/bin/dpkg-preconfig line 99. > E: Sub-process dpkg-preconfig --apt returned an error code (255) > E: Failure running script dpkg-preconfig --apt > > the offending line is > > if (/^ (?i)(?:Pre-)?Depends(?i-):\s+.*?debconf\s+\(\s*([><=]*)\s+(.*?)\s*\)/) > > i am not a perl-expert, but some things seem strange to me about this line: > .*? this sequence seems very strange to me.... > > further all this '?' standing around alone..... > > so what else is wrong on this line? > > I prepended all '?' with '.' without touching the very courious .*? and at > least apt seems to install and configure the stuff, so even i have not really > an idea on what i am doing, it can't be so wrong.... > > but .... did i do the right thing?
these are perl regeps .* means any string or null string, the longest possible .*? means any string or null string, the shortest possible with string 'abcdbcdaba' '.*d' will catch 'abcdbcd' '.*?d' will catch 'abcd'
