The following reply was made to PR bin/169500; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rf...@tristatelogic.com> To: Garrett Wollman <woll...@hergotha.csail.mit.edu> Cc: free...@freebsd.org Subject: Re: bin/169500: /bin/expr improperly requires forward slash to be
escaped Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2012 15:11:55 -0700

 In message <2012...@hergotha.csail.mit.edu>, you wrote:

 >In article <2012...@segfault.tristatelogic.com>,  >rf...@tristatelogic.com writes:  >  >>According to my reading of Sections 2.8.3.1.1 and 2.8.3.1.2 of the ANSI/IEEE  >>standard 1003.2, a forward slash character (/) is an "ordinary" basic  >>regular expression (BRE) character, and as such can be used in a BRE alone  >>to match itself.  >  >IEEE Std.1003.2 was obsoleted by the publication of IEEE  >Std.1003.1-2001; your reference is at least fifteen years old.

 Yes.  My bad.  Sorry.

 (These publications are quite expensive, as you may know, and thus, I have  not updated mine in quite some time.)

 >>As far as I can tell, backslash-escaping of this specific character  >>should not be required within BREs.  >  >Nothing to do with the BRE-ness.  As the 2001 edition of the standard  >states (page 429, lines 16598-16599):  >  >      A string argument is an argument that cannot be identified as  >      an integer argument or as one of the expression operator  >      symbols shown in the OPERANDS section.

 Humm... OK.  How do I retract my PR?