Re: Regexp for marking source code

[David Kastrup]

Dieter Wilhelm <dieter@duenenhof-wilhelm.de> writes:

> David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> Ken Goldman <kgold@watson.ibm.com> writes:
>>
>>> The dired Q command seems quite useful, but
>>> regexp syntax is obscure enough that I can't quite
>>> get what I want.
>>>
>>> What would be a regexp for all .c and .h files.
>>> In a Unix shell, it would be *.[ch],  What's the
>>> regexp equivalent?
>>
>> .*\.[ch]\'
>
> quick and dirty
>
> \.[ch]$
>
> since the likely hood of existing hidden files `.h' and `.c' is too
> small for the hassle of typing .*

That's not it.  For matching, .* at the beginning is entirely
useless.  If you want to avoid files .c and .h,
.\.[ch]\'
will do the trick.  Replacing \' with $ means that you'll also match
multiline file names like
'x.h
whatever'

Probably not important in dired, but I have some healthy matching
paranoia.  For example, if some joker creates a file (and its
containing directory) named
'-rf
/
guffaw'
which is infrequently cleaned up by a sysadmin script, things can get
ugly if the script has not been written carefully.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum