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Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2004 19:18:34 -0500
From: Rob Ellis <rob@web.ca>
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Subject: Re: [OT] sed question
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On Sun, Mar 14, 2004 at 04:50:40PM -0700, Warren Block wrote:
> 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.
> 

This works with sed in /bin/sh and ksh:

sed -e 's/  */\
/g' my_test_text_document.txt

I.e., escape an actual newline. Two spaces before the '*'.

It doesn't work in csh. Don't know why...

- Rob