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bug#15483: POSIXLY_CORRECT documentation vis a vis some simple EREs
From: |
Paul Eggert |
Subject: |
bug#15483: POSIXLY_CORRECT documentation vis a vis some simple EREs |
Date: |
Mon, 07 Oct 2013 11:11:37 -0700 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130923 Thunderbird/17.0.9 |
On 10/07/13 09:53, Glenn Golden wrote:
> grep, when considered as an 'application'
There is no requirement that grep must
be implemented as a POSIX application.
'grep' can be written entirely in machine code.
As far as POSIX is concerned,
'grep' could even be a mechanical Turk,
i.e., not implemented via computer at all.
As a practical matter, users generally prefer
implementations that support useful extensions
to POSIX to implementations that support
only POSIX and nothing more. Supporting a strict-POSIX
option for 'grep' sounds like it wouldn't be worth the
hassle for us. Perhaps I'm wrong, and I could be
proven wrong if someone wrote an easy-to-maintain
patch that implements strict-POSIX behavior for 'grep'.
At any rate, it's not an urgent matter, as there's
no POSIX-conformance issue here, and little practical
benefit to any such change.