Brian Dessent wrote: > [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
The GNU sed maintainer Paolo Bonzini also maintains a version of sed called ssed (super sed) that does support PCREs in addition to BREs and EREs (which are both now supported in GNU sed 4.x+). For more on sed: http://sed.sourceforge.net/ HTH Peter S Tillier "Who needs perl when you can write dc, sokoban, arkanoid and an unlambda interpreter in sed?" -- 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/
