bin/144441: Confusing error message from sed with 's/.*/d' ": unescaped newline inside substitute pattern

[Garrett Cooper]

>Number:         144441
>Category:       bin
>Synopsis:       Confusing error message from sed with 's/.*/d' ": unescaped newline inside substitute pattern
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       non-critical
>Priority:       low
>Responsible:    freebsd-bugs
>State:          open
>Quarter:        
>Keywords:       
>Date-Required:
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   current-users
>Arrival-Date:   Wed Mar 03 07:40:01 UTC 2010
>Closed-Date:
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     Garrett Cooper
>Release:        RELENG_8
>Organization:
Cisco Systems, Inc
>Environment:
FreeBSD garrcoop-fbsd.cisco.com 8.0-STABLE FreeBSD 8.0-STABLE #2: Wed Feb  3 16:57:07 PST 2010     garrcoop at garrcoop-fbsd.cisco.com:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/LAPPY_X86  i386
>Description:
I accidentally misread a web document and thus provided incorrect input to sed. BSD sed failed with a confusing message, but GNU sed led me on to the right track:

[garrcoop at garrcoop-fbsd /usr/home/garrcoop]$ sed -i "" -e 's/games:/d' /etc/passwd 
sed: 1: "s/games:/d
": unescaped newline inside substitute pattern
[garrcoop at garrcoop-fbsd /usr/home/garrcoop]$ sed -i "" -e '/games:/d' /etc/passwd 
sed: /etc/passwd: Permission denied

I'm confused where the newline is coming into play.
>How-To-Repeat:
sed 's/games:/d' /etc/passwd
>Fix:


>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted: