On Wed, 04 Nov 2015 14:23:04 +1100, Steven D'Aprano wrote: >> Its very name indicates that its default mode most certainly is regular >> expressions. > > I don't even know what grep stands for.
>From the ed command "g /re/p" (where "re" is a placeholder for an arbitrary regular expression). Tests all lines ("g" for global) against the specified regexp and prints ("p") any which match. > But I think what Michael may mean is that if you "grep foo", no regex > magic takes place since "foo" contains no metacharacters. At least the GNU version will treat the input as a regexp regardless of whether it contains only literal characters. I.e. "grep foo" and "grep [f][o][o]" will both construct the same state machine then process the input with it. You need to actually use -F to change the matching algorithm. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list