Unix Programming - Re: The precise behaviour of the

Author

Re: The precise behaviour of the | operator in POSIX extended

Icarus Sparry

2006-12-23, 1:33 pm

On Thu, 21 Dec 2006 16:36:37 -0800, Spiros Bousbouras wrote:

> Spiros Bousbouras wrote:
>
> Or to put it otherwise , how portable would a script,
> which uses that behaviour, be ?

Very portable. See
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs...799/xbd/re.html

"The search for a matching sequence starts at the beginning of a string
and stops when the first sequence matching the expression is found,
where first is defined to mean "begins earliest in the string". If the
pattern permits a variable number of matching characters and thus there
is more than one such sequence starting at that point, the longest such
sequence will be matched."