Subject: egrep should report line number when failing to parse a file (with -f)
From: Santiago Ruano Rincón <[email-masked]>
To: bug-grep <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2016 10:59:45 +0200
List-Id: <debbugs-submit.debbugs.gnu.org>

Hi,

Please find below yet another old-standing bug filed against debian.
grep's behaviour is still the same in 2.25.

https://bugs.debian.org/525214

Cheers,

Santiago

----- Forwarded message from Gunnar Wolf <[email-masked]> -----

Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:06:28 -0500
From: Gunnar Wolf <[email-masked]>
To: Debian Bug Tracking System <[email-masked]>
Subject: egrep should report line number when failing to parse a file (with -f)
X-Mailer: reportbug 4.1

[...]

egrep -f takes its input from a file. This functionality is often used
i.e. with logcheck, which works basically off a directory full of
files which contain regexes representing log messages to be either
ignored or pushed up - However, when something goes bad and one of
those lines is not parsable, grep won't help in debugging. As an
example, I got loads of log messages such as:

    From: Cron Daemon <[email-masked]>
    To: [email-masked]
    Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2009 23:02:02 -0500 (CDT)
    Subject: Cron <logcheck@lafa>    if [ -x /usr/sbin/logcheck ]; then nice -n10 /usr/sbin/logcheck; fi

    egrep: Unmatched [ or [^

Finding the file/line where I made this particular mistake was a
tedious job. Users deserve egrep to report the filename and line
number where this error happened.

[...]

----- End forwarded message -----