begin quoting Carl Lowenstein as of Mon, Jul 16, 2007 at 05:02:24PM -0700: > On 7/16/07, Stewart Stremler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [snip] > >I'm assuming that's a gnu sed extension. You can replace / with : in all > >of the seds I have in reach, but not all of them will take an arbitrary > >character after the s. > > > > Well, the oldest sed man.page I have at hand (4.4BSD 1993) says > "Any character other than backslash or newline can be used instead of > a slash to delimit the RE and the replacement"
Cool! > Actually that isn't the oldest reference. _The Unix System_, S.R. > Bourne 1983 says > "As in the editor _ed_, any character can be used instead of /." So implementations that /don't/ do this are broken? Good. > Backtracking further, the 6th Edition manual page ED(I) 1973 says > "Any character other than space or new-line may be used instead of '/' > to delimit the regular expression and the replacement." > This predates sed, but pretty obviously sed was based on ed. Yup. > So there must be something wrong with some of the _sed_s you have in > reach. This feature has been documented at 10-year intervals starting > 34 years ago. Indeed. I learned to use only / and : after getting burned a few times; it's good to know that the sensible solution is the old solution, and any experience that I've had otherwise is due to broken tools. -- It's good to obliterate some (invalid) assumptions once in awhile. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
