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Reading the manual for GNU grep, the special characters (with -E option) are .?*+{|()[\^$.

This is a somewhat pedantic question, but why are ] and } omitted? In particular it says in section 3.1 "An unmatched ) just matches itself", which is true for ] and } as well.

I think it is just a slightly sleeker description of ERE–we can get by without } and ] being special, because their syntactic purpose is served only in a context where specialness fails to be meaningful (that is, after an unmatched { or [ has occurred).

Note that this is not a question about GNU grep per se, but rather about the syntactic rules of ERE.

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  • $\begingroup$ My advice is not authoritative, but I would imagine that this spares useless escaping of these right delimiters. The Unix freaks loved compact typing. $\endgroup$
    – user16034
    Jun 9 at 9:24
  • $\begingroup$ Just a guess: One difference between () versus {} and [] is that () can be nested. If you have an unmatched ) within nested parentheses, you end up with an ambiguous expression. $\endgroup$
    – Jeroen van der Meer
    Jun 12 at 18:58

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