The command "git grep -w ''" dies as soon as it encounters an empty line, reporting (wrongly) that "regexp returned nonsense". The first hunk of this patch relaxes the sanity check that is responsible for that, allowing matches to start at the end. The second hunk complements it by making sure that empty matches are rejected if -w was specified, as they are not really words. GNU grep does the same: $ echo foo | grep -c '' 1 $ echo foo | grep -c -w '' 0 Signed-off-by: Rene Scharfe <rene.scharfe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> --- grep.c | 6 +++++- 1 files changed, 5 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-) diff --git a/grep.c b/grep.c index 7bf4a60..92a47c7 100644 --- a/grep.c +++ b/grep.c @@ -331,7 +331,7 @@ static int match_one_pattern(struct grep_pat *p, char *bol, char *eol, if (hit && p->word_regexp) { if ((pmatch[0].rm_so < 0) || - (eol - bol) <= pmatch[0].rm_so || + (eol - bol) < pmatch[0].rm_so || (pmatch[0].rm_eo < 0) || (eol - bol) < pmatch[0].rm_eo) die("regexp returned nonsense"); @@ -350,6 +350,10 @@ static int match_one_pattern(struct grep_pat *p, char *bol, char *eol, else hit = 0; + /* Words consist of at least one character. */ + if (pmatch->rm_so == pmatch->rm_eo) + hit = 0; + if (!hit && pmatch[0].rm_so + bol + 1 < eol) { /* There could be more than one match on the * line, and the first match might not be -- 1.6.3.1 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html