REGEX AND SHELL QUOTING

When entering a regular expression argument in the shell command line it is often necessary to use quoting (enclosing the argument in " " or ' ') in order to prevent the shell from interpreting certain characters, for example, spaces as argument separators and $ as variable expansions.

Unfortunately it is hard to achieve this in a manner that is portable across POSIX shells, such as those found on GNU/Linux and UNIX, and Windows shell. For example, if you use " " for quoting you will get a wrong result with POSIX shells if your expression contains $. The standard way of dealing with this on POSIX systems is to use ' ' instead. Unfortunately, Windows shell does not remove ' ' from arguments when they are passed to applications. As a result you may have to use ' ' for POSIX and " " for Windows ($ is not treated as a special character on Windows).

Alternatively, you can save regular expression options into a file, one option per line, and use this file with the --options-file option. With this approach you don't need to worry about shell quoting.

DIAGNOSTICS

If the input file is not valid C++, odb will issue diagnostic messages to STDERR and exit with non-zero exit code.

BUGS

Send bug reports to the odb-users@codesynthesis.com mailing list.