Re: \dn [PATTERN] handling not quite right...

Sean Chittenden <sean@chittenden.org> writes:
> I haven't looked in great detail into why this is happpening, but it
> seems as though processNamePattern() doesn't handle ?'s correctly in
> the negative lookahead context correctly.

Negative lookahead context!?  You are several sigmas beyond the subset
of regex functionality that \d and friends are intended to support.
Given that we're defining * and ? as shell-style wildcards, it's not
going to be feasible to handle very much of ordinary regex usage let
alone advanced.

> The more I think about this, a leading pipe could be used
> to pipe the output to a utility, so that \dn | egrep -v '(log|shadow)
> would work and would be the easiest solution.

This on the other hand seems more like a potentially useful feature,
although I'm unclear on what you expect to get sent through the pipe
exactly --- you want column headers for instance?  What if you're using
a nondefault display layout?

            regards, tom lane