On Wed, 26 Nov 1997, Dale Scheetz wrote: : On Wed, 26 Nov 1997, Aaron Denney wrote: : : > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: : > > 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. : > [ snip ] : > 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 character. : > : I think that I will never understand the ins and outs of these quoting : issues. However, this doesn't provide any better fix for my problem. : Removing the inner quotes results in sed carefully replacing all t : characters by the space character, and doing nothing to the tabs. (This : was, after all, my first try, before I went looking at examples and tried : the inner quotes. Your assurances didn't make it work any better the : second or third time I tried it either.) : : If all that sounds like whining and complaining, I want to make it quite : clear that I greatly appreciate the help provided.
I think you are having problems because bash won't let you type a tab at the command line (I think there's a way to do it but I haven't memorised the manpage yet). At any rate, sed can be invoked with the -e option and commands on the command line, yes, but it can also be invoked with the -f option followed by a filename containing your sed command(s). I tried your example and got the same results - it took away the 't' character. I then created a text file called 'sedscr' with vi. That file contained the following text: s/ / /g ^^^^^^^ this is a tab, not a bunch of spaces I then typed 'sed -f sedscr <infile>outfile It worked as advertised. Hope that's what you wanted :) ps I too thought sed interpreted a '\t' as a tab. Apparently this is not the case ... perl does, but sed does not. Oh well. : : Thanks, : : Dwarf : -- : _-_-_-_-_-_- _-_-_-_-_-_-_- : : aka Dale Scheetz Phone: 1 (904) 656-9769 : Flexible Software 11000 McCrackin Road : e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tallahassee, FL 32308 : : _-_-_-_-_-_- If you don't see what you want, just ask _-_-_-_-_-_-_- : -- Nathan Norman MidcoNet - 410 South Phillips Avenue - Sioux Falls, SD 57104 Voice: (605) 334-4454 Fax: (605) 335-1173 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP Key ID: 0xA33B86E9 - Public key available at keyservers PGP Key fingerprint: CE03 10AF 3281 1858 9D32 C2AB 936D C472 -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
