Re: [PATCH 1/3] git-bisect: war on "sed"

From: Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>
Date: Nov 15, 2007, 11:00 UTC
Message-ID: <fc339e4a0711150300n64b9d670o1e183553a9de0cba@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <86tznn4y7v.fsf@lola.quinscape.zz>

On Nov 15, 2007 7:09 PM, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> > 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...]

-Miles

-- 
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.