POSIX Regular Expression Funnyness

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <2962 at ficc.uu.net> peter at ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>Why didn't they add a few backslash-escaped metacharacters, again?

Whatever you do, DON'T use \ for any more escapes!  It is bad enough
that the terminal handler, shell, and troff all use the SAME escape
character (which has occasionally forced me to type sixteen \s in a row).
It would have been far better for utilities to try to pick escapes that
would be unlikely to be used by others that might be in effect as the
same time (shell, editor, terminal handler, grep).