Re: [9fans] empty *

["Peter A. Cejchan" <tyapca7@gmail.com>]

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This is from manpage, but I not sure what _exactly_ it means, and whether
it applies to your problem:
          Care should be taken when using the shell metacharacters
          $*[^|()=\ and newline in pattern; it is safest to enclose
          the entire expression in single quotes '...'.  An expression
          starting with '*' will treat the rest of the expression as
          literal characters.

more strange behavior:
% echo foo.c | 9 grep '*\.c'
%
% echo foo.c | 9 grep '*.c'
foo.c
% echo fooxc | 9 grep '*.c'
%
% echo fooxc | 9 grep '.*.c'
fooxc
% echo fooxc | 9 grep '.*\.c'
%
% echo foo.c | 9 grep '.*\.c'
foo.c
% echo foo.c | 9 grep '*foo.c'
foo.c
% echo foo.c | 9 grep '*.00.c'
%

Looks like
          " An expression
          starting with '*' will treat the rest of the expression as
          literal characters."
(see above) really applies (for unknown reasons).


However, I am just a 'toy programmer', so you were warned ;-)
Regards,
++pac


On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 10:28 AM, Gorka Guardiola <paurea@gmail.com> wrote:

> While playing with grep, I was suprised by grep '*\.c' not giving
> an error (* is missing an operand). Arguably * applied to empty ... [snip]
>

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