Why the sigh? You can turn a search pattern into a match pattern easily enough (as you pointed out). But you can't turn a match pattern into a search pattern. As it is we can have either.
Vefatica,
I am just a new user of TCMD and being quite familiar with the regular expressions engine used in Python or .Net I simply tried a few features using TCMD and became stuck at a few fairly simple points, when following my "natural instincts" in this area :)
Workarounds have been found (e.g. double quoting the regex), but they soon proved to be not quite complete and some other cases I tried did not work as expected. Then another workaround ... I hope you can feel me becoming more and more annoyed in this process ;-) I felt more like a tester, not as an end-user ...
Eventually, I am glad there is a way to make regular expressions working, but it wasn't a smooth exercise. Are there any How-Tos or documentation that describe the use of regexes in TCMD in such a way, that someone like me could start using them without so much hassle? ;-) Even the examples in the help file do not suggest double-quoting the regexes as a rule (only when space characters are present)! The help file also does not mention clearly the fact, that a regex pattern does not specify the full name (as wildcards do, e.g. *ab*.txt), but any part of it! (hence the SEARCH not MATCH). This can be nasty to find out later. I think I was lucky to have discovered it, as my unwanted file names had digits followed by '.rar' after the underscore, so when testing I could easily see, that both 001.rar and 001_001.rar are returned. What if my script decided to remove the files found?
I strongly believe the documentation should be updated in this area, as otherwise, I completely appreciate the power offered by TCC enhanced facilities.