Thanks for agreeing with the evolution of the meaning of "-o". Just to make you a laugh: I was reproducing egrep with $BASH_REMATCH: https://gist.github.com/valerio-bozzolan/6787675e931dce1ba7e9
Definitely not beautiful... but really effective for me. So something like "egrep -o $n regex" also can save the world from code similar to mine. On 9 November 2015 14:50:46 CET, Stephane Chazelas <stephane.chaze...@gmail.com> wrote: >2015-11-08 21:49:03 +0100, Valerio Bozzolan: >> Sorry... typo... >> >> echo abcde | grep -o -E 'b([a-z])d' >> => "bcd" >> >> Can't I choose to have only "c"? >[...] > >That's correct, GNU grep doesn't have that capability (yet). >Recent versions of pcregrep do: > >$ echo abc | pcregrep -o1 '.(.).' >b > >Now, I'm not a GNU grep maintainer but I suppose the question is >how far do we want to take grep away from its original purpose >(print the lines that match a pattern which is what g/re/p >stands for). > >GNU grep is already doing find's job with -r, part of sed's job >with -o/--colour. > >Having said that, I do agree it's the logical continuation after >-o. > >Note that for now, you can already do: > >$ echo abcde | grep -o -P 'b\K[a-z](?=d)' >c > > >-- >Stephane -- Valerio Bozzolan Email sent from Android (CyanogenMod) using K-9 Mail.
