sed vs gnu sed

[Matthew Seaman]

On 09/11/2011 10:30, Vincent Hoffman wrote:
> is there any easy way to make our sed do the same as gnu sed here?
> for now I have encapsulated the whole thing in a subshell
> [backup at banshee ~]$ echo -n $(echo -n "/boot:7:1:5; /:7:1:5;
> /var:7:1:5"  | sed -n 's/[[:space:]]*;[[:space:]]*/;/gp')
> /boot:7:1:5;/:7:1:5;/var:7:1:5[backup at banshee ~]$
>
> Which works but seems a little hackish.

You can do it with awk(1):

# echo -n "/boot:7:1:5; /:7:1:5; /var:7:1:5" | \
  awk ' { gsub("[[:space:]]*;[[:space:]]*", ";", $0) ; printf "%s", $0 }'

Not sure if that's any better than your solution using echo though. 
Also trivial in perl(1) or python(1) or whatever, but it seems a waste 
to fire up a whole perl interpreter just to do that.

	Cheers,

	Matthew

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Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                   7 Priory Courtyard
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