how to pass \b to grep on w32?

how to pass \b to grep on w32?

[John Steele Scott]

Hi,

I am trying to pass the following to M-x grep:

grep -nHr --include=*.c . -e \bWORD\b

On my GNU/Linux system, this works (if I put quotes around the regexp
and include string), but on Windows XP, it doesn't work (no matches are
found, when I know there should be some). If I just have WORD as the
regexp, it works fine, but it's matching DWORD, and I only want to find
WORD (I'm trying to make a 16-bit program 32-bit clean, blech).

It seems to me that something is fouling up the \b part of the regexp.
Can someone tell me how to get the \b through to grep?

I am using Emacs 21.3.50.8 of 2003-12-29 from TEI Emacs, but I have
replaced the grep from TEI by GNU Grep 2.5.1 from the GNUWin32 project.

cheers,

John

Re: how to pass \b to grep on w32?

[Eric Pement]

John Steele Scott wrote:

> I am trying to pass the following to M-x grep:
>
> grep -nHr --include=*.c . -e \bWORD\b
>
> On my GNU/Linux system, this works (if I put quotes around the regexp
> and include string), but on Windows XP, it doesn't work (no matches are
> found, when I know there should be some). If I just have WORD as the
> regexp, it works fine, but it's matching DWORD, and I only want to find
> WORD (I'm trying to make a 16-bit program 32-bit clean, blech).
>
> It seems to me that something is fouling up the \b part of the regexp.
> Can someone tell me how to get the \b through to grep?

You probably need to add double quotes to the search string, and a path
name to begin the search, which should be in forward slashes, not
backslashes. If I omit the path name, my installation of Emacs searches
the same folder where runemacs.exe is stored. Try this:

   grep -nHr --include=*.c . -e "\bWORD\b" c:/path/to/start/

That's how it works on my system (WinXP)

--
Eric Pement