Dale Scheetz wrote: >On Wed, 26 Nov 1997, Aaron Denney wrote: >> 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 chara >cter. >> >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.) >
According to `man sed', only a few characters can be backslash-escaped, and t is not one of them. On the other hand it is used for _output_ by the l command within sed. Enclose an actual tab in the quotes; if you are typing it in and the shell interferes, use `ctrl-v tab'. -- Oliver Elphick [EMAIL PROTECTED] Isle of Wight http://www.lfix.co.uk/oliver PGP key from public servers; key ID 32B8FAA1 -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .