[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Q1. Querying info sed reveals the expression matcher to be "greedy", > matching the longest possible string. Is there a way to make it match the > shortest possible, so that echo aaabbbccc | sed 's/^.*b//' (altered but > similar) grabs aaab not aaabbb?
If you have perl available (or just a tool that uses perl-compatible regexps, i.e. grep -P) you can add the '?' character after any qualifier to get the non-greedy version, i.e. '*?' is the non-greedy '*', '??' is the non-greedy '?', etc. But this is a feature of pcre, which I don't believe applies to sed in any shape or form. However, most sed scripts are pretty easy to do in perl with little modification, so if you require this function that's what I'd do. Brian -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
