Subject: Re: regexp problem/help?

From: Adam Shostack <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 94 17:26:59 EDT

| Don Walker asked,
| 
| | The one question that I have left on this subject is whether there is
| | any limit on the size of regexp patterns other than the LINEBUF size.
| | My throw-away pattern is continuing to grow  (it is now 220 chars) and
| | this may become an issue in the future.

David Tamkin replied 
| If it does grow too long, you can put the patterns into a file (however,
| they'll have to conform to egrep's expression rules without the additional
| extensions procmail has), and change the recipe to this:
| 
|  :
|  * ? formail -xSubject: | egrep -f expressionfile
|  /dev/null

	As long as you're going to an external grep, you might want to
look into agrep, which is able to do aproximate searches, case
insensitive searches, search until the best match is found, etc.
cs.arizona.edu:/agrep

Adam