[lug] glibc regexp bug?

[rm at fabula.de]

On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 10:37:57AM -0600, D. Stimits wrote:
> I'm helping to debug some software which uses the regular expression 
> functions of glibc: regcomp(), regexec(), regerror(), and regfree(). 
> These functions behave as expected on older linux releases such as RH 
> 7.3, and some of the current releases of distros that don't update a lot 
> (not sure which, probably debian). On fedora core 2 and 3 it breaks 
> (possibly core 1, no way to test).
> 
> I'm trying to verify if the regular expression is valid or 
> not...regcomp() always fails on this expression:
> "*". Just a plain old wildcard that should stand for "any number of any 
> character". Can anyone tell me if "*" is technically not a valid regular 
> expression? Or is this a bug in glibc on fedora?

Hi,

are you talking about a single '*' character? That's a metacharacter (modifier)
that is only valid after a pattern. Maybe you mean ".*" (zero or more occurences
of any character).

 HTH RalfD

> D. Stimits, stimits AT comcast DOT net
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