Re: locate and regexp search

[James Youngman]

On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 02:12:03PM -0500, Karl Berry wrote:

[ locate --regex foo should match ... ]

> Any substring, as if the regexp started with ^.* and ended with .*$ (and
> is matched against the whole path name).
> 
> slocate -r o/b  matches a database entry like foo/bar, for example.
> 
> Thanks again.  Dealing with regex.c madness in autoconfigury stuff will
> probably be the worst part ...

No, because we already need that for find's -regex and the proper
working of the po subdirectory.  So regex.c madness is already taken
care of.

You're right though about it being awkward, findutils has some
horrible manual kludge in the top-level Makefile.am which ensures that
regex.c is included in the distribution.  With some versions of
automake and gnulib, it appears to be the case that that file gets
left out, even though regex.h is included.  With other combinations of
gnulib/automake, it gets included.  I really don't know why, though my
previous guess at the reason was, I'm told, wrong.  Still, though the
horrible hack is horrible, it works.

Reards,
James.