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Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2004 16:50:40 -0700 (MST)
From: Warren Block <wblock@wonkity.com>
To: "Steven N. Fettig" <freebsd@stevenfettig.com>
In-Reply-To: <4054DD10.5060504@stevenfettig.com>
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Subject: Re: [OT] sed question
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On Sun, 14 Mar 2004, Steven N. Fettig wrote:

> I can't figure out what the newline character is... I've tried \n \r &\,
> etc. with no avail.  I run the following:
>
> sed 's/[ ]/\n/g' my_test_text_document.txt

>From the sed man page:

"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."

I think this is a BSD thing, and sed on other systems does handle \n and
other literals in substitutions.  It's annoying enough that I just use
Perl instead.

perl -pe 's/ /\n/g' my_test_text_document.txt

which actually would be better as

perl -pe 's/\s./\n/g' my_test_text_document.txt

-Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA