>EGexecute should return a match, though, >right? The pattern '\a' matches >the data 'a'. So the bug is in EGexecute >somewhere, not in its caller. Thanks for the reply. In my opinion the bug is not in the EGexecute, since it uses re_search (from gnulib) and the re_search is not returning a match. So there is no problem in EGexecute. I also compared python re.search with \a also don't return a match and I found \a can be interpreted a bell or alarm. It's good to mention that the lack of match happens for all lowercase characters that are not defined in regex (for example echo "j" | grep -i --color '\j'. Comparing to python, they don't allow us to escape any incorrect lowercase characters, for example: >>>re.search("\j","j", re.IGNORECASE) re.error: bad escape \j at position 0 Due to that I think grep should also ignore the non-maching/bad character instead of printing them. Best regards, Tomasz Dziendzielski pon., 18 paź 2021 o 06:08 Paul Eggert napisał(a): > On 10/17/21 15:15, Tomasz Dziendzielski wrote: > > It's being printed even when re_search in EGexecute doesn't return a > match. > > Gexecute should return a match, though, right? This is because the > pattern '\a' matches the data 'a'. So it sounds like the bug is in > EGexecute somewhere, not in its caller. >