From: fabian AT cs DOT uct DOT ac DOT za (Fabian Nunez)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: sed hates me
Date: 8 Jun 1998 13:07:20 GMT
Organization: University of Cape Town
Lines: 49
Message-ID: <6lgnm8$fl5$1@groa.uct.ac.za>
References: <357aae4b DOT 6492244 AT news1 DOT bway DOT net> <1998060802335800 DOT WAA17898 AT ladder01 DOT news DOT aol DOT com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: toro.cs.uct.ac.za
To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Precedence: bulk

In <1998060802335800 DOT WAA17898 AT ladder01 DOT news DOT aol DOT com> myknees AT aol DOT com (Myknees) writes:

>In article <357aae4b DOT 6492244 AT news1 DOT bway DOT net>, jlrubin AT bway DOT net (Josh Rubin)
>writes:

>>Sed vewsion 1.18 doesn't seem to like backspaces in
>>regular expressions. 

[SNIP]

>One possible way to find ways to express "backspace" & other characters to sed
>is to view a file in less.exe.  If you look at the formatted man page you
>mention with less using the -U switch, or if you open the *.1 file in emacs,
>you'll see that there are a bunch of ^H characters.  That is your clue that by
>typing control-H, you generate the character "backspace".

>The problem is that you need to be able to type that without the cursor going
>backward.  In bash and under vi, you can do that by first typing control-v.  In
>the DOS editor, EDIT, you can do that by first typing control-p.  Maybe someone
>knows how to get a control-h character into an emacs buffer or onto a
>command.com command line--I don't.

I'm pretty sure that command.com won't let you - but in emacs you just
type ctrl-q ctrl-h to get a ^H.  This also works in the minibuffer
(the line at the bottom of the screen), so you can do stuff like:

esc % ctrl-q ctrl-m enter enter

this gets rid of all the ugly ^M's that appear at the end of each line
in a file that was written with an ms-dos-style editor.

>If you put control-H into the regexp instead of the backslash and 'b', sed will
>match the backspace characters.

[SNIP]

>>this this specific to the DJGPP port?

>It's a feature, I think.  sed isn't like awk.

>--Ed (Myknees)

Cheers
Fabian
--
Fabian Nunez, B.Sc(Hons)      Collaborative Visual Computing Laboratory,
fabian AT cs DOT uct DOT ac DOT za           University of Cape Town

"Ram Disk" is NOT an installation procedure!