apt-mark's regex matching seems odd
Bug #1628654 reported by
Brian Murray
This bug affects 1 person
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| apt (Ubuntu) |
Triaged
|
Medium
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
[ 12:06PM 4528 ] [ bdmurray@
$ apt-mark showmanual \*vcard
2vcard
[ 12:07PM 4529 ] [ bdmurray@
$ apt-mark showmanual vcard\*
2vcard
I was surprised the latter option found a match.
$ apt-cache policy apt
apt:
Installed: 1.3~rc4ubuntu1
Candidate: 1.3~rc4ubuntu1
Version table:
*** 1.3~rc4ubuntu1 500
500 http://
100 /var/lib/
| Changed in apt (Ubuntu): | |
| importance: | Undecided → Medium |
Revision history for this message
| Julian Andres Klode (juliank) wrote | #1 |
| Changed in apt (Ubuntu): | |
| status: | New → Triaged |
Revision history for this message
| Julian Andres Klode (juliank) wrote | #2 |
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There are three types of patterns
(1) word
(2) fnmatch() style
(3) regex
They're all intermangled together, so: A bare word only matches a direct match. If it includes a special character like * then it tries matching a fnmatch pattern first, and if that fails, tries to match a regex. And these expressions are not anchored as you have noticed.
What you want to search for is probably vcard$ or ^vcard. In fact, always include a ^ or a $ when specifying expression, as that forces apt to do regex matching.
Now, it's of course annoying that it is this way, but it's not a bug. I hope we get patterns at some point, so you can search name(regex) without having to worry about this shit. But that's going to take a while.
I guess we can keep this bug open as the pattern tracking bug, unless we already have another one for that, so I'm marking that as triaged for now.