[bug-grep] Re: grep: -i option not working i cronjobs

[Elliott Hughes]

On Nov 12, 2004, at 01:54, Aharon Robbins wrote:

> > There is a 3rd approach which hopefully we will use longer-term:
> >
> > 3) upgrade to a newer regex.c and just set REG_ICASE when -i is used
>
> My problem with REG_ICASE is that it's a regex-compile-time bit. I'd
> rather it be a regex-execute-time bit, since in gawk the use of
> IGNORECASE can be changed around dynamically.

why do you favor that interpretation? when i've faced a similar dilemma 
in the past, i've decided that (to use Perl-compatible syntax), 
prepending "(?i)" is an appropriate interpretation of "-i". my argument 
being that it's (a) easy to explain, and (b) doesn't unnecessarily take 
away the ability to have case-sensitive subexpressions.

presumably your argument is that if "-i" is equivalent to prepending 
"(?i)", there's no trivial way to take an arbitrary regular expression 
and disable any "(?i)"/"(?-i)" subexpressions.

i think both are perfectly reasonable interpretations in the absence of 
any overriding reason to favor one or the other, so i'd be interested 
to know if you have a strong argument in favor of the interpretation 
you describe.

--
http://www.jessies.org/~enh/