@rl_dane

Oh, didn't know about -c. I usually just pipe to wc -l I guess.

@amin

-c, -l, -h, -H, and -q are my favorite #grep flags. :D

Huh, that almost became a [Marcel Duchamp] reference. 😅

Marcel Duchamp - Wikipedia

@rl_dane

I just use -v and -E

@amin @rl_dane you guys use flags?... :p
@amin @rl_dane @sotolf You guys still use grep instead of ripgrep. Tst

@thedoctor @amin @sotolf

...and bash instead of zsh
...and grep/awk/sed instead of jq
...and firefox instead of chrome
...and the fediverse instead of facebook

Face it... I'm an unpopular-opinion neckbeard level boss. XD

cc: @mirabilos

@rl_dane Those are so not comparable!

@amin @sotolf @mirabilos

@thedoctor @rl_dane @amin @mirabilos At least bash and zsh is comparable to grep ripgrep, as zsh is just a strictly better bash ;)

@sotolf @thedoctor @rl_dane @mirabilos

Mm, not really though? ripgrep is meant for bulk grepping of files

@amin @thedoctor @rl_dane @mirabilos I think I had it installed, I just never remembered to use it :p

@sotolf @thedoctor @rl_dane @mirabilos

I mostly just use it to run rg TODO and see all the spots in a codebase I marked as still needing work.

@amin @sotolf @thedoctor @mirabilos

Why is ripgrep better than just grep -R?

@rl_dane @amin @sotolf @thedoctor @mirabilos it's somehow a lot faster if you want to grep a few GiB of code, like 15 minutes to 30 seconds

@kabel42 @amin @sotolf @thedoctor @mirabilos

Interesting! I wonder what kind of algorithmic optimizations (as opposed to compiler optimizations) they're using to do that, and if regular (GNU/BSD) grep could do the same.

Because I'll wear clown shoes and a tutu before changing to a "rewrite the world in rust!" utility 😂

@rl_dane @amin @sotolf @thedoctor @mirabilos From what little i have read, some assumptions about what you are greping and different defaults. Doing the same in existing grep would probably break compatibility.

@kabel42 @rl_dane @amin @sotolf @thedoctor eww, it’s not even a drop-in then


(For not-a-drop-in, I found pcregrep interesting. Sadly, Debian recently dropped it, but in the versions which don’t have pcregrep any more, you can use grep -P for many use cases. pcre2grep is not a drop-in for pcregrep either
)

@mirabilos @kabel42 @amin @sotolf @thedoctor

I was a total PCRE stan in the olden days, but I've steered more towards regular extended regexp for compatibility. I do miss \d, \w and \s, though. [[:space:]] feels so clumsy to type and use several times in a regex, I'll sometimes put a sp="[[:space:]]" line at the start of a script, and you'll see several invocations of "${sp}" in my regex strings.

But again... compatibility. ;)

Is there a big difference between (GNU) grep -P and pcregrep? I hadn't heard of that utility before.

@amin @kabel42 @rl_dane @sotolf @thedoctor I never used \d and the likes, always felt them much too complicated. I almost never use POSIX character classes (besides the BSD [[:<:]] and [[:>:]]), rather I just hit [ tab space ] quickly.

GNU grep -P does a PCRE grep, it doesn’t support all of the extra flags of pcregrep though, and before the version in IIRC trixie was very broken.

@mirabilos @amin @kabel42 @sotolf @thedoctor

is [[:<:]] and [[:>:]] the same as \< and \>?

@rl_dane @amin @kabel42 @sotolf @thedoctor obviously not, because it’s written differently ;)

re_format(7) knows:

There are two special cases** of bracket expressions: the bracket expres- sions '[[:<:]]' and '[[:>:]]' match the null string at the beginning and end of a word, respectively. A word is defined as a sequence of charac- ters starting and ending with a word character which is neither preceded nor followed by word characters. A word character is an alnum character (as defined by ctype(3)) or an underscore. This is an extension, compati- ble with but not specified by POSIX, and should be used with caution in software intended to be portable to other systems. (as for the mark:) POSIX leaves some aspects of RE syntax and semantics open; '**' marks de- cisions on these aspects that may not be fully portable to other POSIX implementations.

The definition for \< / \> differs between less, perlre, pcre, â€Š I believe, but they all are somewhat simiar.

@rl_dane @amin @kabel42 @sotolf @thedoctor perlre(1) actually has


A word boundary ("\b") is a spot between two characters that has a "\w" on one side of it and a "\W" on the other side of it (in either order), counting the imaginary characters off the beginning and end of the string as matching a "\W".


 so the \< probably comes from less(1)?


 hm, no. But, where then?

@mirabilos @amin @kabel42 @sotolf @thedoctor

I used to use \b a lot, but \< and \> are just as easy to use, and POSIX. ;)

\w is nice, though. I think the closest POSIX one is [[:graph:]]? (Not super close, though)

@rl_dane @amin @kabel42 @sotolf @thedoctor \< and \> are not POSIX.

perlre(1) \w is identical to POSIX [a-zA-Z0-9_] in the C locale, so [[:alnum:]_] if you have support for POSIX character classes.

@mirabilos @amin @kabel42 @sotolf @thedoctor

Ah, yes. [[:alnum:]] was the one I was thinking of.

@mirabilos @amin @kabel42 @sotolf @thedoctor

Waiiiiit, what does the underscore before the second bracket do? I've never seen that before.

No mention of it in RE_FORMAT(7) on FreeBSD.

@rl_dane @amin @kabel42 @sotolf @thedoctor the exact same thing as the underscore in [a-zA-Z0-9_], and I’d be surprised if the FreeBSD manpage would not document it

@rl_dane @amin @kabel42 @sotolf @thedoctor let me blow your mind if that was news to you:

[[:alpha:][:digit:]_]

@mirabilos @rl_dane @amin @sotolf @thedoctor yay context sensitive [], there is no way that can go wrong \s
@kabel42 @rl_dane @amin @sotolf @thedoctor it’s actually not, the first unescaped [ switches from RE context to RE-Bracket context in the bracket-begin state, in which you can have an optional ^ (except in shellglobs where it is spelt !), then an optional ] not taken as the end of the RE-Bracket, then an optional -, then any amount of expressions of the type a-z, [:charclass:], [=equivalenceclass=], x, then an optional -, then a closing ] which terminates the RE-Bracket context.
@kabel42 @rl_dane @amin @sotolf @thedoctor (I erred: you can have either the ] or the - at the beginning, not both)
@kabel42 @rl_dane @amin @sotolf @thedoctor (and I forgot collating elements, which is totally fucked up, [a[.ch.]] in e.g. es_ES.UTF-8 matches either a or ch, so a bracket expression in POSIX has a variable matching length
)
@kabel42 @rl_dane @amin @sotolf @thedoctor these are rare-to-never-used features, thankfully
@kabel42 @rl_dane @amin @sotolf @thedoctor tbh the only time I use something other than simple chars and ranges in bracket expressions is the BSD [[:<:]] and [[:>:]] extension (which matches a zero-length string)
@kabel42 @rl_dane @amin @sotolf @thedoctor no, the zero-length string between a nƍn-word‑ and a word character

@kabel42 @rl_dane @amin @sotolf @thedoctor and, duh, it’s a Fediverse link, you copy/paste it into the Search form of your client to read it, not the browser



 I wish GtS would go on and support web+ap://


@mirabilos @rl_dane @amin @sotolf @thedoctor i still have no idea what an "ƍ" is

@kabel42 @mirabilos @amin @sotolf @thedoctor

I think he's using the German keyboard on his phone.

@rl_dane @kabel42 @amin @sotolf @thedoctor no, he’s using the MirKeyboardLayout on his laptop
@rl_dane @mirabilos @amin @sotolf @thedoctor no, that's not a normal character in german, only Ă€Ă¶ĂŒĂ„Ă–ĂœĂŸ
@rl_dane @kabel42 @mirabilos @amin @thedoctor german keyboards don't have that letter :p

@sotolf Definitely not. I can readily do Þ and Ø but not that one.

@rl_dane @kabel42 @mirabilos @amin

@thedoctor @rl_dane @kabel42 @mirabilos @amin ƍ, on mine that's a dead key on alt-gr ® and then o, on qwertz I wouldn't even know :p
@kabel42 @rl_dane @amin @sotolf @thedoctor like in ad-hƍc network
@mirabilos @rl_dane @amin @sotolf @thedoctor never seen that in normal text. So pronounced like like noon?
@kabel42 @rl_dane @amin @sotolf @thedoctor noon is pronounced as nun
@kabel42 @mirabilos @rl_dane @amin @thedoctor I've seen macrons used quite a lot in transliterating japanese, never outside of that though.
@kabel42 @rl_dane @amin @sotolf @thedoctor (here I miss the ability to write XHTML on Fedi, this should have been pronounced as <span xml:lang="de">nun</span>)
@kabel42 @rl_dane @amin @sotolf @thedoctor ƍ wie das O in Ofen
@kabel42 @rl_dane @amin @sotolf @thedoctor lang, wie in Ofen, nicht kurz wie in offen
@mirabilos @rl_dane @amin @sotolf @thedoctor lang wÀre oofen oder ohfen oder so
@kabel42 @rl_dane @amin @sotolf @thedoctor dann machs halt was lĂ€nger als dein Ofen-O, wenn du das so kĂŒrzt

@kabel42 @rl_dane @amin @sotolf @thedoctor ist jedenfalls zweimorig, aber nicht verlÀngert
@mirabilos @rl_dane @amin @sotolf @thedoctor aber du meinst das gleiche wie non?
@kabel42 @rl_dane @amin @sotolf @thedoctor wie NON von Römern in Steintafeln gemeißelt
@mirabilos @rl_dane @amin @sotolf @thedoctor ka was das bedeutet đŸ€·
@kabel42 @rl_dane @amin @sotolf @thedoctor mach’s halt nicht kurz (nonn)
@kabel42 @rl_dane @sotolf @thedoctor @amin ist eh lustig, weil Hochdeutsch zwei SilbenlÀngen hat und Rheinisch drei, von denen keine genau einer hochdeutschen entspricht


@kabel42 @mirabilos @rl_dane @amin @thedoctor

Statt saafen laafen kaafen, is'e mit'n lÄngen stÄngen slÄngen fÄngen gÄngen :p

@kabel42 @rl_dane @amin @sotolf @thedoctor ist nur ne Aussprachehilfe, typisch fĂŒr Lateiner