2007/9/4, Justin Pryzby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > tag 440813 moreinfo > thanks > > On Tue, Sep 04, 2007 at 04:15:05PM +0300, Petteri Pajunen wrote: > > Package: grep > > Version: 2.5.1.ds2-6 > > > > On my amd64 debian box using locale > > fi_FI.UTF-8 (all LC_XXX variables set to fi_FI.UTF-8 as well as LANG) > grep > > fails to handle character ranges correctly. For example, the first grep > is > > wrong but the second works correctly: > > $ echo "w" | grep "[a-z]" > > $ echo "a" | grep "[a-z]" > > a > Are you sure this is not the normal problem of character ranges not > being portable except within the C locale? The common example is that > [a-z] might actually mean aAbBcCdDeE...z, which is often not what's > expected, since it both includes capital letters and misses "Z". I > don't know what fi locale looks like..
I am quite sure, since other users reported different results on 32-bit systems, also using 2.5.1ds2-6 and fi_FI (unless fi_FI differs between i386 and amd64). I agree that applications should not count on character ranges, but a-z is probably used in many scripts (that's how I ran into this potential bug). The finnish alphabetical order is the common one, i.e. "abcd.....tuvwxyz...". So v and w come after a and before z. The typical solution is to either use [[:alpha:]] or just use: |LC_ALL=C grep '...' I have no problems with this solution, but I would bet that there are lots of scripts using a-z ranges and not expecting letters such as v and w being outside of a-z. This can introduce subtle bugs, for example ignoring files with letters v and w in their name etc.. Petteri
