Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!rutgers!cmcl2!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: POSIX Regular Expression Funnyness
Message-ID: <9563@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 1 Feb 89 23:24:50 GMT
References: <4118f7b1.ae48@apollo.COM> <5980041@hpfcdc.HP.COM> <2962@ficc.uu.net>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 9

In article <2962@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>Why didn't they add a few backslash-escaped metacharacters, again?

Whatever you do, DON'T use \ for any more escapes!  It is bad enough
that the terminal handler, shell, and troff all use the SAME escape
character (which has occasionally forced me to type sixteen \s in a row).
It would have been far better for utilities to try to pick escapes that
would be unlikely to be used by others that might be in effect as the
same time (shell, editor, terminal handler, grep).