On Thu, Jan 12, 2023 at 06:13:13PM +0100, René Scharfe wrote: > > I'm not quite sure what you mean here by "non-greedy repetitions". > > Something like: > > > > # prefer "foo bar" to "foo bar bar"; only matters for colorizing or > > # --only-matching > > git grep -E 'foo.*?bar' > > > > ? If so, then yeah, that changes the meaning of a bare "?" and people > > might be surprised by it. > > Right. To be fair, question mark is a special character and you'd > probably need to quote it anyway if you want to match a literal > question mark. Otherwise I get: > > $ git grep -E 'foo.*?bar' > fatal: command line, 'foo.*?bar': repetition-operator operand invalid This is on macOS, I assume? With glibc it seems to be quietly ignored: $ git grep -E -o 'foo.*?ba' .clang-format .clang-format:foo, bar, ba So it is not treated literally (as it would be without -E). But nor does it make the match non-greedy (otherwise it would have output "foo, ba", as "git grep -P" does). So it does seem like all bets are off for what people can and should expect here. Which isn't to say we should make things worse. I mostly wondered if REG_ENHANCED might take us closer to what glibc was doing by default, but it doesn't seem like it. -Peff
