From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Mar 17 15:39:27 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com (cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com [24.2.89.207]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 00A3A14D87 for ; Wed, 17 Mar 1999 15:39:14 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from cjc@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com) Received: (from cjc@localhost) by cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com (8.9.3/8.8.8) id SAA06674 for freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG; Wed, 17 Mar 1999 18:39:00 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from cjc) From: "Crist J. Clark" Message-Id: <199903172339.SAA06674@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> Subject: sed and newlines To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG (FreeBSD Questions) Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 18:39:00 -0500 (EST) Reply-To: cjclark@home.com X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL40 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG The sed manpage says, Sed Regular Expressions The sed regular expressions are basic regular expressions (BRE's, see regex(3) for more information). In addition, sed has the following two additions to BRE's: . . . 2. The escape sequence \n matches a newline character embedded in the pattern space. You can't, however, use a literal newline character in an address or in the substitute command. If I am reading this correctly, % sed 's/\n/ /' file Should take the file and subsitute three spaces in place of every newline. However, it does not. It does not seem to understand '\n.' In spite of what it says, I have tried literal newlines (with \ and ^V), and as claimed on the manpage, it does not work (it will generate errors). Am I missing something obvious? Or is sed broken? Thanks. -- Crist J. Clark cjclark@home.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message