regex problem with webcheck

[Siggy Brentrup]

On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 14:56 +0100, R Kimber wrote:
> On Sat, 18 Jul 2009 23:38:55 +0100
> R Kimber wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, 18 Jul 2009 18:11:07 +0000 (UTC)
> > Aart Koelewijn wrote:
> > 
> > > I don't know webcheck, but for a regex I think you will need ^\/ to be 
> > > sure the / is taken literal and not as a special character.
> > 
> > Thanks.  But I did try that.  I also tried puting the argument in quotes.
> 
> Actually, the example on the manpage (which works) implies that you don't
> need to escape it.
> 
> I've come to the conclusion that metacharacters don't work and that only
> the simplest regular expressions (literal strings) actually work.

It seems to me that you get bitten by the shell mangling your
arguments, don't worry that still happens to me after decades.  If I
want to see what the invoked program sees, I use the attached trivial
little python script.

% ~/scripts/show_args.py webcheck \ \\\ "$SHELL" "$SHELL" '$SHELL'
argv[1:] = ['webcheck', ' \\ /usr/bin/zsh', '/usr/bin/zsh', '$SHELL']

congrats-if-you-expected-the-result-ly yours
  Siggy

ps: I don't know webcheck either.
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