Keith Marshall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Wednesday 12 April 2006 8:47 pm, Stepan Kasal wrote: >> On Wed, Apr 12, 2006 at 08:45:04PM +0200, Ralf Wildenhues wrote: >> > here's a patch that I think does more or less what Bruno's patch >> > intends to do, against current CVS. >> >> I worked on the same issue. We both use the same pattern >> `sed -n '/@datadir@/p;/@docdir@/p;/@infodir@/p...' ...` > > I'd like, if I may, to sound a note of caution concerning this sed > command syntax: the use of semicolons as command separators in the sed > script is an implementation dependent extension, which is not portable. > On some platforms, the test using this sed syntax *will* fail, not > because the feature you are testing is unsupported, but because the test > itself is invalid. > > In November 2005, Robert Goulding posted these bug reports on > groff@gnu.org: > http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2005-11/msg00004.html > http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2005-11/msg00074.html > > It turns out that Robert was having a problem building CVS groff, > which requires texinfo >= 4.8 to compile the info files, under Mac OS X, > and configure was saying his texinfo was too old, in spite of him having > explicitly just installed texinfo-4.8. The actual problem was that the > configure test employed a sed command with this same semicolon usage, > and was not behaving as expected -- the test failed because *it* was > invalid, *not* because the detected texinfo was too old!
Is there any evidence that there exists a sed implementation that does not support the semicolon as command separator? Note that the thread you quote above is _not_ about semicolons being unsupported, but rather about missing ones. Autoconf is using semicolons in sed expressions already for many years (eg in the AC_OUTPUT_FILES macro). Andreas. -- Andreas Schwab, SuSE Labs, [EMAIL PROTECTED] SuSE Linux Products GmbH, Maxfeldstraße 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany PGP key fingerprint = 58CA 54C7 6D53 942B 1756 01D3 44D5 214B 8276 4ED5 "And now for something completely different."
