On 7/10/18 9:02 AM, Paulo Marcel Coelho Aragão wrote: > On Tue, Jul 10, 2018 at 08:27:18AM -0400, Greg Wooledge wrote: >> Bash uses ERE (Extended Regular Expressions) here. There is no \< or \> >> in an ERE. >> >> http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap09.html#tag_09_04 > > Thanks for the reference. The document lists only ^ and $ as anchors. > However, this indicates to me that bash recognizes \< \> as word anchors:
No, it doesn't. It indicates that the system's POSIX regular expression implementation has extensions. > Empirically all this demonstrates: > > 1. bash recognizes \< \> \b as word anchors No, it doesn't. > 2. bash doesn't evaluate them correctly when used as literals Yes, it does. It may not conform to your assumptions. > 3. bash evaluates them correctly when used with parameter expansion No. It passes them to the system's POSIX regexp library function, which understands them as an extension. -- ``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU c...@case.edu http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/