2015-11-09 17:00:36 +0100, Valerio Bozzolan: > 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.
You may want to read: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/169716/why-is-using-a-shell-loop-to-process-text-considered-bad-practice https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/209123/understand-ifs-read-r-line https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/65803/why-is-printf-better-than-echo Here, if there wasn't a pcregrep already, I'd rather do it in perl or GNU sed than bash. Like: perl -lne 'print for /a([a-z])c/g' Also note that: echo abac | pcregrep -o1 'a(.)' b c > So something like "egrep -o $n regex" also can save the world from code > similar to mine. GNU grep can't add it like that as that would break backward compatibility. grep -o 1 regex file is currently meant to print the occurrences of "1" in the "regex" and "file" files. Even adding it as: grep -o1 regex file would probably not be a good idea as that would mean some ad-hoc parsing of the options (in "grep -o1 regexp", "1" would be an argument to "-o" while in "grep -oi regexp", "i" currently is a separate "-i" option). So reasonably, it should probably be a separate option like -O 1. -- Stephane
