On Wed, 2003-02-26 at 22:30, Paul Eggert wrote: > Robert Anderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > However, note that _any_ new choice of delimiter will not only fail for > > the case of the chosen character, but will also fail for the characters > > '&' and '\' which are always metacharacters on the RHS of a sed > > expression. > > '\' we can't do much about here, though we can print an error message > and exit. It's pretty rare to find it in file names, outside of > DOS-based systems, and those guys can always use '/' as it's > equivalent. And anyway '\' will break half the code in autoconf > regardless, as it uses 'echo', so I'm not too worried about > disallowing '\' in file names. > > '&' we can defang by using '&' as the delimiter. '&', like '|', > rarely occurs in file names because it also is a shell metacharacter. > So, how about if we use '&'?
>From the various solutions of "use a different character", I'd say '|' has the best balance of "unlikely to be used" and "doesn't terribly obfuscate the source". That's cool by me. Thanks for patiently putting up with this debate, Bob
