Bug in url_regex pattern matching?

We are running Squid-1.NOVM.17 on Digital Unix 3.2C.

Due to policy decisions at our site we have to ban access to particular
web sites because of their content.

What we have in our squid.conf are the lines:

acl banned url_regex "/path/to/squid/etc/banned-list"
..
..
..
http_access deny banned

Now in the the banned-list file I had the line:

http://www.sex*

which I expected would mean that acceses to any URL with http://www.sex in
it would be denied. However I discovered that sites like
http://www.sedon.co.uk/ were being denied as well. I know that it was this
line as after I removed it, and restarted Squid - I was then able to
access the above site.

Is this a bug in the url_regex pattern matching mechanism or simply some
misunderstanding on my part about how it should work?

        Rgds.,

                Nick.

# Nick O'Brien, Computer Officer "It gives me a headache just to #
# Canterbury Christ Church College think down to your level", Marvin #
# Phone: +44 1227 782468 the Paranoid Android, HHGTTG #
# Email:nick@cant.ac.uk Web:http://www.cant.ac.uk/staff/nick/home.html #
Received on Mon Jan 26 1998 - 06:54:22 MST