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Now I see - was RE: sed-4.1.2-1: backslash in 'i' and 'a' changed?
- From: "Jan Schormann" <Jan dot Schormann at BrainLAB dot com>
- To: <cygwin at cygwin dot com>
- Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 13:17:09 +0200
- Subject: Now I see - was RE: sed-4.1.2-1: backslash in 'i' and 'a' changed?
- Reply-to: <Jan dot Schormann at BrainLAB dot com>
Hi,
sorry, by now even I noticed that this is OT because it
depends entirely on upstream. Then again, I found out
where I was misunderstanding the documentation, and I'd
like to share:
I always thought that the '\' after 'a' was denoting a
continuation line and could be left out if you put all
the text in the same line, which of course I'm always
tempted to do when I provide expressions using the '-e'
command line switch.
Thanks for the enlightenment,
Jan.
.. Full story:
> From `info sed':
>
> `a\'
> `TEXT'
> [...]
> Escape sequences in TEXT are processed, so you
> should use `\\' in TEXT to print a single backslash.
Yeah well, so '\\x' should print a single backslash and an 'x',
but it doesn't print a backslash at all ... Oh I see, *if* it's
the first thing in the argument, where sed 4.1.2 reads it
as '\' + '\x' in these examples:
$ echo | sed -e 'ix\\x'
x\x
$ echo | sed -e 'i\\x'
x
While 3 bs produce the (by me) desired result in both versions:
$ echo | sed -e 'i\\\x'
x
OK, can live with that ;-)
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