Subject: Re: bin/23853: sed's "regular expressions" suck
To: Christian Biere <christianbiere@gmx.de>
From: James Chacon <jmc@NetBSD.org>
List: netbsd-bugs
Date: 12/23/2003 22:11:55
On Tue, Dec 23, 2003 at 11:08:39PM +0100, Christian Biere wrote:
> 
> [ Please, don't set Reply-To to invalid addresses! ]
> 
> vax@carolina.rr.com wrote:
> > >Synopsis:       sed's "regular expressions" suck
> 
> > sed's "regular expressions" are downright embarassing.
> > There are no alternations "|", no "+", no '?', not much of anything.
> 
> I think you missed the parameter -E.

Which is correct. Per SUSE3 the standard options are:

-e, -f and -n

Also, the regex's supported are basic regular expressions. The ones mentioned
above are extended regular expressions and therefore would need a non-standard
option (-E in this case) to enable their use. Specifically they should *not*
be enabled by default as folks using BRE's with those symbols will get 
unexpected behavior then.

James