Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 144613
yum - misleading description of pattern matching in docs
Last modified: 2014-01-21 17:50:48 EST
Description of problem: 'man yum' repeteadly talks about matching package names with regular expressions but when one tries to use them it turns out that these "regular expressions" are really shell matching patterns, a.k.a. "wildcards", which are quite different things. For example a command yum list installed 'kernel*24*' lists non-matching as a regular expression Installed Packages kernel.x86_64 2.6.9-1.724_FC3 installed A pattern like 'kernel*24????' will also be fine; but if one will indeed try to use a regular expression instead yum list installed 'kernel.*24.*' then on my FC3 installation this returns silently. The same with any other yum request I tried.
Cool. Fixed up the manpage in cvs. thanks
In a sense Seth is right as manpage now says: All the list options mentioned above take file-glob-syntax wildcards or package names as arguments, for example yum list available foo* will list all available packages that match foo*. but in descriptions above one can see 'regexp1' and 'regexp2' everywhere. One needs to be a "documentation lawyer" to notice that this "regexp" is not really a "regexp". A global 's/regexp/filespec/' on a manpage would make that much cleaner.