Re: I'm an idiot and sed proves it...

[Stephen Zander <srz@mckesson.com>]

Aaron Denney wrote:
> dwarf@polaris.net wrote:
> > For the tabs, I try the following:
> > 
> > 	sed -e 's/'\t'/ /g' <infile >outfile
> > 
> > Which very cleanly places every t in the document with a space!??
> > 
> > For the hyphonation I try:
> > 
> > 	sed -e 's/-'\n'//g' <infile >outfile
> > 
> > and although the file gets slightly smaller (I didn't try to find out just
> > what had been removed) none of the hyphonated text is corrected.
> 
> This isn't quite the appropriate venue for such questions, as it is
> a general unix/sed question and not very specific to Debian.  In the
> future try the newsgroup comp.unix.programmer or comp.unix.questions.

Lignten up :) Dale provides immense assistance to this list; he deserves
a little slack.

> Your problem is that the inner quotes don't add another level quoting, but
> take away another level of quoting.  To be a little clearer:
> 
> > 	sed -e 's/'\t'/ /g' <infile >outfile
>                 ^^    ^^^^ are the quoted parts.
> 
> The \t is not quoted, but is interpreted by your shell, which replaces the \t
> with an actual t.  If you take out the inner quotes, it should work:
>  	sed -e 's/\t/ /g' <infile >outfile
> 
> This will pass an actual \t to sed, which will interpret it as a tab characte
r.

Actually, no.  Bash requires $'\t' for the literal insertion of
an escaped character (and no, I didn't know. I looked it up :))

So your first example, Dale, becomes

	sed -e s/$'\t'/' '/g < infile > outfile

and the second

	sed -e s/-$'\n'//g < infile > outfile

Note the lack of surrounding quotes!


Stephen
---
"Normality is a statistical illusion." -- me



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