From: David Kastrup Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2007 11:18:50 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/3] git-bisect: war on "sed" Message-ID: <861war4uzp.fsf@lola.quinscape.zz> In-Reply-To: "Miles Bader" writes: > On Nov 15, 2007 7:09 PM, David Kastrup wrote: >> > Er, I suppose -- if you are acquainted with that particular shell >> > variable syntax (I suspect knowledge of sed is far more widespread). >> >> sed is rather bad with regard to portability. If you take a look at >> the respective portability section in the autoconf file, it is almost >> longer than that of Bourne shells. > > I don't think that's really a fair characterization -- almost all of > the autoconf sed portability caveats concern weird corner cases in the > dusty corners of the language (and some are "common" issues with other > tools, i.e., avoiding ^ and $ inside of regexp groups). > > For typical straightforward usage, there seems little problem. > > [The main portability problems I've actually _noticed_ with sed are > the "-e" versus ";" issue and what happens with "\n" in various > contexts...] What about character classes containing the pattern delimiter, \+, \?, \|, nested grouping, anchors in groups, * after groups? That's all rather straightforward usage. -- David Kastrup