Re: sed? escaping back slash

[tt]

"Craig Allsop" <address@hidden> writes:

> Is this the correct behaviour for sed?
> 
> echo test | sed "s/test/\\/"
> 
> Under 4dos shell in Win98, Cygwin GNU version v1.18 gives: \
> Under 4dos shell in Win98, Cygwin GNU version v3.02 gives: char 9:
> Unterminated 's' command

I know nothing about 4dos shell but under Unix (POSIXy or Bourne) sh,
the latter is correct.

> As far as I can see in the documentation, I need only supply one
> back slash to escape a backspace in the replacement string.

Inside double quotes, shell will translate each \\ into \
before sed even sees them. Inside single quotes shell will
leave everything untouched. So the following are equivalent:

sed 's/test/\\/'
sed "s/test/\\\\/"
sed s/test/\\\\/

What 4dos shell will do I have no idea however.
One option always is putting the command

s/test/\\/

in a file and using sed -f file ...

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen