svlogd pattern documentation

[Joshua N Pritikin <jpritikin@pobox.com>]

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I've read the PATTERN MATCHING section of the svlogd man pages a few
times and I'm still confused.  Since I am well versed in perl regex and
extended regex, I'm pretty sure that I'm confused because the
documentation is poorly written, not because I'm dumb.

So let's take a look:

  pattern is applied to the log  message  one  character  by
  one,  starting  with  the  first.

Uhm, I think this first sentence can just be removed.  If the reader
doesn't know what a pattern is then refer them to the sed info page.
Perhaps: "An svlogd pattern is similar to a grep or sed regexp, except
much simpler."

  A character not a star (``*'') and not a plus (``+'') matches itself.

OK

  A  plus matches  the  next character in pattern in the log message
  one or more times.

Huh?  Isn't the reverse of how it usually works?

Pattern +abc matches aaabc?  In other tools, the pattern is written
'a+bc'.  Clarify please.

  A  star  before  the  end  of  pattern
  matches  any  string  in  the  log  message  that does not
  include the next character in pattern.  A star at the  end
  of pattern matches any string.

What about a star at the beginning of the pattern?  No effect?

Some examples would really help.  How do I deselect all lines containing
"File does not exist" such as:

2005-12-09_06:24:23.99609 [Fri Dec 09 06:24:23 2005] [error] [client
84.73.105.43] File does not exist: /home/ohl/ohl-v2/htdocs/xmlrpc.php

Like this?

-*File does not exist*

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