Bug 223556
| Summary: | apropos(1) should use regular expression by default for a keyword search | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Product: | Base System | Reporter: | Wolfram Schneider <wosch> |
| Component: | bin | Assignee: | Yuri Pankov <yuripv> |
| Status: | In Progress --- | ||
| Severity: | Affects Only Me | CC: | emaste, pstef, yuripv |
| Priority: | --- | ||
| Version: | CURRENT | ||
| Hardware: | Any | ||
| OS: | Any | ||
This may be no longer true. I get the same number of results for both '.' and '~.' (9072). (In reply to Piotr Pawel Stefaniak from comment #1) I get the same number of results for both '.' and '~.' too now. $ apropos '.'|wc -l 9517 $ apropos '~.'|wc -l 9517 However, the result number on FreeBSD 14.0-CURRENT are still weird. # case sensitive regex $ apropos '~f.*bar' | wc -l 4 # case insensitive regex $ apropos 'f.*bar' | wc -l 5 # regex by grep $ apropos . | grep 'f.*bar' | wc -l 7 $ apropos . | grep -i 'f.*bar' | wc -l 8 On centos8 it looks better: $ apropos 'f.*bar' | wc -l 10 $ apropos . | egrep -i 'f.*bar' |wc -l 10 |
apropos does a keyword search. In the past the keyword was a regular expression On FreeBSD 10 you can run: # search for 'f.*bar' $ apropos 'f.*bar' | wc -l 4 # or dump the database apropos '.' | wc -l 5582 On FreeBSD12-current $ apropos 'f.*bar' | wc -l apropos: nothing appropriate 0 $ apropos '.' | wc -l 318 To use regular expression, you need to prefix the tilde now: $ apropos '~f.*bar' | wc -l 2 apropos '~.' | wc -l 4488 I do not like this change. We are incompatible with anything before in FreeBSD, and we are incompatible with the gnu tools on debian/ubuntu/centos.