Subject: Re: bug#15483: POSIXLY_CORRECT documentation vis a vis some simple EREs

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 16:53:21 -0700

Glenn Golden wrote:
> Per the final sentence of 9.5.3, "conforming applications cannot use
> 	[constructs like '*xyz']"

This is making the incorrect assumption that 'grep'
internally must be implemented as a strictly conforming
POSIX application.  POSIX does not require that, and the
rest of your conclusions therefore do not follow.

Eric explained the intent of POSIXLY_CORRECT pretty well.
Occasionally people ask for a different feature, where
a GNU application diagnoses the use of any extension to
POSIX.  The need for such a feature is less, though, and
the hassle is greater, and so it's typically not worth
the aggravation.

As this does not seem to be a bug in grep I'm going to
take the liberty of marking it 'done'.