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in 15 years it never sticks and by the time i need it again i've forgotten it! :D

Don't learn the Perl influenced extensions. You just need POSIX EREs (and BREs for some older utilities) which are simple enough to keep in the head.

And with the POSIX EREs, everything except the syntax for character classes will carry over to other common Regex dialects.

I'll just leave this here

"The Insanity Of Linux's Regular Expressions " https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ys7yUyyQA-Y

Many loosely compatible (so, not compatible if we are strict..) implementations are a problem, but awareness and testing helps.

All in all, my life would be miserable if I would not have regexp available in grep/sed/editor/ide/java/python, their usefulness trump any such inconveniences.

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