sed question...

[Nikos Vassiliadis]

On Tuesday 25 September 2007 19:58, Gary Kline wrote:
>	But trying to parse this from man sed is more than
> 	difficule.  And I have yet to find "ba" in the man page.  That is
> 	why I asked for some insights rather that to be told to "go read
> 	the man page"; to me, that's dismissing the issue rather than
> 	addressing it.

Hm, my suggestion was wrong... sed is a bit cryptic to learn from the
manual page. The manual can be used as a reference, if you alread know
sed.

So, ba is:
branch to the a label
for example:
my_label:
 ...
bmy_label

My points are:
If you want to learn sed, you have to invest some time.
If you want to ask for an one-liner that does what you want,
that's fine too.

sed isn't only s/foo/bar/. There is a dc(1) clone in sed,
which is at least an amazing accomplishment for sed. You
might want (or not) to learn more things about it.

> 	Right.  I always do a perl -pi.bak [...] mostly out of habit.
> 	With sed, redirection saved the new output, leaving the original
> 	in ``.''  FWIW, I was using the sed on my Ubuntu server.  It is
> 	different from the BSD sed that I've used now/then since 1978.

I think this version of sed is different too, since it's part
of BSD since 4.4BSD. It may be compatible with the older BSD
one. The in-place replacement is a non-standard extension which
both BSD and GNU sed share.

Cheers

Nikos