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From: Dave <dfeustel@mindspring.com>
To: Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu@FreeBSD.org>
In-Reply-To: <20080721124055.GA33609@eos.sc1.parodius.com>
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Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:01:55 +0000 (UTC)
Cc: freebsd-pf@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: BNF Syntax of pf commands
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On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 05:40:55AM -0700, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
>On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 12:38:00PM +0000, Dave wrote:
>> I'm looking for a BNF description of the PF ruleset.
>> Is that available somewhere?
>
>It's in the manpage, section GRAMMAR.
>
>http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=pf.conf&apropos=0&sektion=5&manpath=FreeBSD+7.0-stable&format=html#end

Thanks! I had just found this myself using google and noticed that the bnf is
coded up by hand instead of via yacc or bison. The reason I got interested in
this is that I saw pretty clear indications on my OpenBSD 4,3 pf firewall that
certain 'equivalent' rules (differing only the presence or absence of
'optional' syntactic sugar keywords ) in my pf.conf file did not produce
identical behavior from pf. I've started wondering about how one would
implement regression testing on pf.