<<< Date Index >>>     <<< Thread Index >>>

Re: [OT] GNU Grep (was: Re: hook for not editing email)



On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 05:56:37AM -0500, David T-G wrote:
> ...and then David Yitzchak Cohen said...
> % On Fri, Jan 02, 2004 at 02:41:21PM +0100, Magnus Bäck wrote:

> % > Am I missing some subtle point? The -q option seems to be specific to
> % > GNU grep, by the way.
> % 
> % Yeah, here's a more portable way to do it:
> % if egrep -q '^Subject: .*<eom>$' $file >/dev/null 2>&1 ; then

My bad ... that -q should be gone.

> If -q is specific to GNU then how is including it "more portable"?

Simple: it's not :-)

> I'd
> think you should skip it entirely,

Yup ... as I said, I screwed up :-(

> which would also save you from having
> to dump stderr since you wouldn't be throwing an error every time you ran
> it.

Well, yeah, except I'd dump stderr anyway, since there should be no
possible error except $file being unreadable (for instance, if it
doesn't exist), and that'd be more of a Mutt error than a grep error,
so you might as well not have any FD open to the terminal for the grep
command, even if you don't expect errors to occur.

> I'm not positive (and I don't have a non-GNU system on which to try
> it at the moment), but I wouldn't be surprised if the error changed the
> exit code of egrep and thus botched the test anyway; it's worth checking.

I'm sure it would.  The result of an error would be a nonzero exit code,
and your editor would be invoked (which is always safe).  However, the
"correct" (read: what GNU scripts do) way to do it is to toss the -q
option altogether.

 - Dave

-- 
Uncle Cosmo, why do they call this a word processor?
It's simple, Skyler.  You've seen what food processors do to food, right?

Please visit this link:
http://rotter.net/israel

Attachment: pgpWbKzKKYY7U.pgp
Description: PGP signature