Re: [bug-grep] -X option undocumented (in --help, doc/grep.1, doc/grep.texi)

[Stepan Kasal]

Hi,

On Thu, Jan 27, 2005 at 04:06:04PM -0500, Charles Levert wrote:
> The '-X' option, and in particular its use with the "awk" matcher
> ("-X awk") is undocumented.

please leave it undocumented.

It doesn't provide any new functionality besides -X awk.

And the implementation of awk regexps is not perfect, I think.

The new GNU regex conatins some means to set AWK style syntax, yes.
Yet gawk doesn't use it directly: it parses the regex first.

In particular, awk regexps allow escape sequences \NNN, where NNN is an
octal value.  So /\040/ mathes space.
grep -X awk doesn't seem to support this.

I'm afraid that regex.c doesn't support these escape sequences.

We would have to make sure that the regexes are fully compatible with awk
regexes before we decided to document (and thus support) this feature.

I think it's not worth the trouble.

Stepan