Re: [pcre-dev] PCRE 7.5-RC2 Release candidate

On Tue, 1 Jan 2008, Sheri wrote:

> Ok, I re-made pcregrep under both Msys/mingw and Visual Studio. Both run
> without crashing.

Good!

> The Visual Studio one is not accepting any glob type file names at all.
> All of the following say they are invalid arguments:
>
> *
> *.txt
> *.*
> ???????.txt

In the Unix world, file globs are resolved by the shell, so there is no
code in pcregrep itself to handle them. It expects to receive a list of
real file (or directory) names. I guess that's what's behind the
behaviour in these cases.

> If told to recurse, the one built in Msys will recurse one level only.
> If the subdirectories have their own subdirectories they are not
> searched. Does it recurse deeper on Linux?

Yes. The code for handling recursion is different for Linux and Windows.
The Windows code is contributed code (of course). It looks as if it
should work recursively down any number of levels, but I have no means
of trying to debug it.

> The one built with Visual Studio, if I give it one complete file name,
> it does search that one file and display the found text. It seems a
> complete existing file name is the only valid file name argument.

Possibly in that environment, the directory scanning code does not get
build. It is conditional on HAVE_WINDOWS_H and it uses windows.h.

> I'd love to see it work properly; would be happy to relay any
> intermediate type results you'd need to see to fix it if and when you
> ever feel like tackling it.

The problem is that I wouldn't know where to start. However, all is not
lost. I had a private message from Bob Rossi, who is away and not able
to post to the mailing list. He offered to take a look at all this
Windows stuff when he is back in his normal environment. Meanwhile, I
plan to release 7.5 sometime next week unless something important turns
up to cause me to hold on.

Philip

--
Philip Hazel