support -e to specify pattern

[Brian de Alwis]

It would be most excellent if bzr-grep supported a '-e' switch to explicitly specify the pattern.

I recently had to back out to using plain grep as my pattern began with a '-' and so was being interpreted for a switch.

[Parth Malwankar (parthm)]

Hi Brian,

Escaping "-" seems to allows the patterns starting with "-" to be searched. E.g.

[grep]% bzr grep "\-grep"
INSTALL:'bzr-grep' is a bazaar plugin so you need to install it
INSTALL: $ bzr branch lp:bzr-grep ~/.bazaar/plugins/grep
INSTALL: $ mv bzr-grep ~/.bazaar/plugins/grep

Is the above behavior suitable to cover your use case or are there
some other common cases that we need to cover? I ask as I haven't
used -e before and grep man page wasn't very helpful with examples.

[1] http://docs.python.org/library/re.html#regular-expression-syntax

[Brian de Alwis (slyguy)]

> Escaping "-" seems to allows the patterns starting with "-" to be
> searched.

That's a nifty workaround. I would still recommend adding -e: it's the
standard mechanism that most Unix savvy non-Pythoners would expect.

BTW: thanks for your work on bzr-grep. It's been far more useful than
I anticipated.

[Parth Malwankar (parthm)]

I agree. Having standard behavior is good. I check if bzrlib command line option processing supports (or can be enhanced) for this.

[John A Meinel (jameinel)]

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Brian de Alwis wrote:
>> Escaping "-" seems to allows the patterns starting with "-" to be
>> searched.
>
> That's a nifty workaround. I would still recommend adding -e: it's the
> standard mechanism that most Unix savvy non-Pythoners would expect.
>
> BTW: thanks for your work on bzr-grep. It's been far more useful than
> I anticipated.
>

I'm also pretty sure that:

bzr grep -- "-pattern"

Should work just fine. and "--" is the standard "end of option flags"
argument.

I don't really care whether or not it takes '-e'.

John
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[Colin D Bennett (colinb)]

Yes,

bzr grep -- "-pattern"

does work. The "-e PATTERN" option could be added but is not necessary since the standard "--" works already. Unless the POSIX grep "-f FILE" option was added too, in order to read patterns from the file FILE: then a "-e PATTERN" would be a good addition.