Subject: grep documentation feedback
From: David Apps <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 10 Jun 2021 20:42:03 +0100
List-Id: <debbugs-submit.debbugs.gnu.org>

I hope that you are well.

Thank you for your work on this great software.

I have some feedback about the document at the following address:

http://www.gnu.org/software/grep/manual/grep.html

When quoting from this document, I have removed the non-ASCII 
characters. The characters that I have removed were left and right 
single quotation marks.

1. In the section "3.3 The Backslash Character and Special Expressions":

\<
Match the empty string at the beginning of word.
\>
Match the empty string at the end of word.

Perhaps changing "of word" to "of a word" would be more consistent with 
the language elsewhere in the document.

2. In the section "3.6 Basic vs Extended Regular Expressions":

In basic regular expressions the meta-characters ?, +, {, |, (, and ) 
lose their special meaning; instead use the backslashed versions \?, \+, 
\{, \|, \(, and \).

Should } and \} appear in these lists?

3. In the section "4 Usage":

$ grep -n -- 'f.*\.c$' *g*.h /dev/null

The other examples do not begin with $. Perhaps remove $ for greater 
consistency.

4. In the section "4 Usage", perhaps the answer to question 3 would be 
better if the examples used -* in place of * to search for files that 
begin with -.

Thank you.

David