GREP (GNU grep) 2.5

[James L. Fitzgerald]

Gentlemen or Ladies,

First let me express my gratitude for all your work on these utilities!

I use GREP and other unix utilities as part of the Cygwin package (version 
2.340.2.5) on a Windows XP Pro Dell Pentium 4 Workstation.

Though the documentation available through "man grep" reads, regarding "Regular 
Expressions":
[quoting]
grep understands two different versions of regular expression syntax: "basic" 
and "extended." In GNU grep, there is no difference in available functionality 
using either syntax. [endquote]

However, I have found that I can make the "OR" operator ("|") work in a regular 
expression only if I invoke the -E command line option.

The following command does not work: grep "mArg|gat" [file]  [double quotes 
used to escape bash]. Whereas the following command does work: grep -E 
"mArg|gat" [file].

Perhaps this is a problem with the Cygwin version of GNU grep and not a bug, 
but I thought it worth reporting.

Thank you for your time and attention,

Sincerely, 

James L. Fitzgerald, Knoxville, Tennessee