Bash regex tests wh'appen?

[David Rothenberger]

On 1/11/2007 8:07 AM, Dave Korn wrote:
> 
>   I upgraded quite a lot of bash versions in one go, and one of my
> shell-scripts broke.  I've reproduced it to a simple test case which shows
> that either regex tests have turned into non-reg-ex text matches, or that I've
> really misunderstood something here.  I checked the last few release
> announcements and didn't see anything about the behaviour of =~ changing.

It's mentioned in /usr/share/doc/bash-3.2.9/CHANGES:

f.  Quoting the string argument to the [[ command's  =~
     operator now forces string matching, as with the
     other pattern-matching operators.

Also, I believe the unquoted pattern is already protected from expansion 
of special characters, so you don't have to worry about *.

> /artimi/tools/cygwin/bin $ if [[ "foo.h" =~ "foo.h" ]] ; then echo "yes" ;

[[ "foo.h" =~ foo.h ]]

> /artimi/tools/cygwin/bin $ if [[ "foo.h" =~ ".*foo.h" ]] ; then echo "yes" ;

[[ "foo.h" =~ .*foo.h ]]

> /artimi/tools/cygwin/bin $ if [[ "foo.h" =~ "\.\*foo.h" ]] ; then echo "yes" ;

[[ "foo.h" =~ \.\*foo.h ]]

-- 
David Rothenberger                spammer? -> spam@daveroth.dyndns.org
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