RE: Unsupported grep options

[Jamboretz, Chris]

Thanks Antonio!

 --colour and -NUM are not necessary. If I find them being used I'll change 
them. The --silent and -P option are used a lot.

Best regards,
Chris Jamboretz

-----Original Message-----
From: Antonio Diaz Diaz <antonio@gnu.org> 
Sent: Thursday, March 3, 2022 8:24 PM
To: Jamboretz, Chris <chris.jamboretz@intel.com>
Cc: zutils-bug@nongnu.org
Subject: Re: Unsupported grep options

Jamboretz, Chris wrote:
> First let me say thanks for providing this set of tools.

You are welcome. :-)

> I've found some unsupported command line options and the first three 
> are probably the biggest concern:
>
> --silent
> -P  --perl-regexp
> --colour

I can easily implement these, but is --colour really needed? I generally 
dislike implementing spelling variations, but this one is specially confusing 
because GNU grep does accept an environment variable named GREP_COLORS but none 
named GREP_COLOURS.

> others are
>
> -G  --basic-regexp
> -U  --binary
> -u  --unix-byte-offsets

'-u, --unix-byte-offsets' is going to be removed next year from GNU grep:

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/grep.git/plain/src/grep.c
       case 'u':
         /* Obsolete option; it had no effect; FIXME: remove in 2023  */
         error (0, 0, _("warning: --unix-byte-offsets (-u) is obsolete"));
         break;


> -T  --initial-tab
> -NUM

I don't see how -NUM can be implemented while respecting the syntax of command 
line arguments[1] where '-23' would mean '-C2 -C3', not '-C23'. I would 
recommend to use -C instead of the non-standard grep "option" -NUM.

[1]
http://www.nongnu.org/arg-parser/manual/arg_parser_manual.html#Argument-syntax

> --line-buffered
> --label=LABEL

No problem with these either.

I'll release a new version of zutils with the new options ASAP (in a few days).

Best regards,
Antonio.