Xavier wrote: > On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 6:58 PM, clemens fischer wrote: > >> is there a regular expression describing the version comparison >> algorithm in pacman/lib/libalpm/package.c::alpm_pkg_vercmp()? > > Could you give an example of what you are trying to do? simple example, looking for the details of "ratpoison" (window-manager): $ pacman -Qs rat|wc 44 251 1977 (44 lines of mostly irrelevant output) $ pac sL rat pac: local/ratpoison which is the one line i need when part of the package name is known. There are other options to search descriptions. I am currently using the following pattern to exclude version suffixes: local vers_glob="-?([nN][gG][_-])+([[:digit:]])+([[:alnum:][:punct:]])" It is used lateron like this: eval tmp=\"\${tmp%%\${vers_glob}}\" I got bitten by the "-NG_*" suffix just today, and every once in a while I notice some package isn't found or properly listed. If there is a regex or a bash-snippet, I could massage it into proper bash extended globbing syntax. The bash script is too big to post it, but you'll find it here[1]. [1] http://freenet-homepage.de/inode/pac.sh clemens