Re: [List] Re: [List] Re: Nice easy sed question

On 13/09/2025 00:04, Bob Proulx wrote:
> Kyle Evans wrote:
>> Bob Proulx wrote:
>>> I think the synopsis is about as good as it can get in the document
>>> format of a manpage.  It is missing a little explanation that says how
>>> to terminate a, i, c commands and how to chain in multiple commands
>>> with one following the other.  It wasn't designed to squeeze an entire
>>> sed program all on one line, at least not all of the time.  There are
>>> some quite long and pretty gnarly multiline sed programs that are
>>> unreadable on multiple lines without jamming them all together onto
>>> one line.
>> The SYNOPSIS is factually incorrect, though (seehttps://reviews.freebsd.org/D52495).
> Oh!  I thought we were talking about this part.
>
>       [1addr]a\
>       text    Write text to standard output immediately before each attempt to
>               read a line of input, whether by executing the “N” function or by
>               beginning a new cycle.
>       [2addr]c\
>       text    Delete the pattern space.  With 0 or 1 address or at the end of a
>               2-address range, text is written to the standard output.
>       [1addr]i\
>       text    Write text to the standard output.
>
> That's the documentation I thought I was referring to.  It's not
> really clear that a newline terminates the command.  An example or
> three would help to make that more apparent.
>
>> We don't do GNU-style permutation of non-option arguments and, as far as I'm aware,
> And I would not have thought to try it with placing options in any
> other order either.
>
>> have never done so in getopt(3)[0].  Stating that any options can come after the
>> script/command will just lead to unexpected behavior, because we treat those as
>> files rather than restarting option parsing.
>       sed [-Ealnru] command [-I extension] [-i extension] [file ...]
>
> Right.  That's wrong.  At least something like this.
>
>       sed [-Ealnru] [-I extension] [-i extension] command [file ...]
>
> Or whatever you wrote in the bug report that is being reviewed.
>
> Bob
>
> P.S. I have this belief that option permutation is a style that came
> to GNU from MS-DOS which always uses /options at the end of the option
> arguments rather than before them.
>
>      dir *.* /p
>
> I think a generation of people grew up with that syntax that options
> go at the end which caused them to want to type it in that way with
> Unix commands too.  I am sure it was at least an influence anyway.

Interesting discussion guys - thanks for posting. "Nice easy sed 
question" was 8v)

I actually solved the problem by using wrapper functions in sh to make 
the i and a commands (in particular) easy to read. I only wanted to 
add/remove/edit lines from configuration files while writing an 
easy-to-follow installation script. I discovered by quoting the newline 
you can add several lines in one hit. I'm now going to check its 
portable enough to work in a penguin colony.

And Bob - agree there's a lot of MS-DOS in Linux - look at the calling 
convention for a start!

Thanks, Frank.