Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!tektronix!reed!kab
From: kab@reed.bitnet (Kent Black,L08,640,7754072)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Bug in grep -i ?
Summary: Yes, yes, yes: BSD derived bug
Message-ID: <13800@reed.UUCP>
Date: 26 Dec 89 23:03:13 GMT
References: <1989Dec25.210118.7946@phri.nyu.edu>
Sender: news@reed.UUCP
Reply-To: kab@reed (Kent Black)
Organization: Reed College, Portland, OR
Lines: 46

In article <1989Dec25.210118.7946@phri.nyu.edu> roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes:
>
>	Is there any reason, other than a bug, why the following two
>commands (extracted from a history list) should give different output?
>
>   122	15:51	grep -i 'N:.*SIRIUS' yalerem.txt
>   123	15:51	grep -i 'n:.*sirius' yalerem.txt
>
No.

Bsd derived bug that refused to go away until ~BSD4.[2-3]; I thought old
bsd-grep folded upper case in the pattern onto lower case, but not
lower to upper (but see below): e.g.,
	$ grep -i KENT /reed/etc/passwd
	kab:irAbYvOt4zBKQ:238:20:Kent Black,L08,640,:/u/v/kab:/bin/csh
	$ grep -i kENT /reed/etc/passwd
	$
	$ grep -i KeNt /reed/etc/passwd
	kab:irAbYvOt4zBKQ:238:20:Kent Black,L08,640,:/u/v/kab:/bin/csh
I fixed it on our vax and may have remembered backwards; patch is
trivial.

The bug is slowly being eradicated.  Grep works as documented on at least
	More BSD4.3 (VAX) (and, I presume, 4.3-tahoe)
	SunOS 4.0 (Sun3/60)
	Ultrix UWS2.0 (DECstation 3100)

Bug still exists for
	BSD4.[1-2]
	NeXT 1.0 
	(they actually reversed the behaviour, unless I've misremembered
		nexttues> nidump passwd . | grep -i kent
		kab:J5o2F5X1fbYAY:238:20:Kent Black:/u/kab:/bin/csh
		nexttues> nidump passwd . | grep -i KENT
		nexttues>
	Now isn't that special ;-)
	UTEK 4.0 (tek4317)	(also reversed the behaviour)

Sales Pitch: (except that it isn't for sale)
Gnu grep (ggrep) has always been correct, besides which it is public
domain, much faster than 4.3-grep on our vax (pointless comparison for
any files I had handy on the 3100: lots of zero's ;-), has context printing
(lines before, after or both), emacs-style word matching and
6 g'zillion other neat things.  Use it instead, if you can.

-- kab