>> > nope, that's not right. * starting a pattern escapes the whole string. >> > this is unique to grep. >> > >> >> Argh, yes, it has a special meaning. I have somehow managed to miss >> this for all this time. > > it's easy to miss, but critical especially since we have other implementations > that don't do this. i'd argue that they should for consistency.
It seems to me that grep requires it, in some sense, because the Unix grep has a -f option that resembles it. Other regexp users almost invariably achieve this by other, simpler means. ++L
