At first they told me "this is regex, we think its Perl", (I got the pattern files through our non-technical account manager). I asked for confirmation from the techies and I now get the reply (two months later, summer hols all round) that it is egrep regex. Of course we go live ASAP and I have a nice, Perl based solution developed and can think of little worse than a re-write to shell/egrep or perl-forking egreps.

Cheers,
R.