Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 92022
\w is not an alias for [[:alnum:]]
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:54:11 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0) Description of problem: \w is supposed to be an alias for [[:alnum:]] in all regular expressions. However in the sed in RH 9, [[:alnum:]] matches digits, whereas \w does not. \w is an alias for [[:alnum:]] in all recent versions of grep. \w is an alias for [[:alnum:]] in the sed that was distributed with RH 7.0 It is broken in RH 9 Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): sed-4.0.5-1.rpm How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. ANy trivial test case will show the bug! 2. 3. Additional info: The workaround is trivial'; substitute [[:alnum:]] for \w. However, this bug will break a great number of existing scripts.
\s is also supposed to match a white space character, and that doesn't work either.
\w and \W fixed in glibc http://sources.redhat.com/ml/libc-hacker/2003-06/msg00033.html and will make it into the next glibc rpm and into sed as well soon. \s is a bug in sed documentation according to sed maintainer and will be killed from the docs soon.
sed-4.0.7-2 in rawhide uses glibc regex instead of its own copy, so this should be fixed in sed-4.0.7-2 plus recent glibc.