Uhmmmmm... so the old adagio that "* is greedy" has an exception when zwnlaa come into play; I expected that the \s* had eat all the whitespace before the e-mail address. Ok. Now I am still to understand why that \S thing works...

Oh, by the way, I am doing:

perl -i.bak -pe 'BEGIN { $status = 0 } /^root:(?!\s*admin\@somewhere\.here\s*$)/ and $status = 1 ; END { exit $status }' aliases

and it seems to work great!

Ciao!
--bronto

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

In reply to Re^4: On zero-width negative lookahead assertions by bronto
in thread On zero-width negative lookahead assertions by bronto

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.