Re: alternation option end of string

On 2026-05-03 11:45, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> On Sun, May 3, 2026 at 6:56 AM Ray Andrews <[email protected]> wrote:
>> It might not actually be the '$' just some mechanism for matching a
>> string that must end after some substring.
> That's not what you're asking for, tho.  You're asking for the entire
> string to fail to match if there's anything after the substring, but
> in the same pattern you want the substring itself to match so you can
> extract it.  You can't simultaneously have a failure and a success.
> That's why Roman's solution has (compare && out=success ||
> out=failure) -- there's no single pattern expression that can do both
> branches.  (There might be a perl expression that works, but I'm not
> confident pcre is perl-ish enough to do it.)
I thought the thing was logically possible because it can be 
articulated: 'cat' then either nothing || an 's' which can itself be 
followed by anything.  But if it's not doable, as I said, no matter cuz 
the functionality is there and I'd do it Roman's way anyway cuz it's 
self-explanatory.  Too much terseness already, so I wish for more 
terseness very lightly.  Sorta like a while back I was wondering if:
(( x > 5 )) && x=5
... had a more compact syntax -- if not so what, it's not a problem, 
still, sometimes zsh offers these little shortcuts.