A problem with regexes in sed

[John Summerfield]

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view.

I'm running sed on debian (woody), and I want to convert a man page to plain
text by eliminating the <c>\b<c> sequences.

On my system, I do have a regex man page. On reading that, and the sed (man & 
info) and awk documentation, i think this should work:
sed -e  's=\b.==g' 

However, it does not, so I did a little exploration:
Nabarlek:~# echo -e 'a\ba' | sed -e  's=\b.==' | xxd
0000000: 0861 0a                                  .a.
Nabarlek:~# echo -e 'a\ba' | sed -e  's=\b.==g' | xxd
0000000: 0a                                       .
Nabarlek:~#

It seems to me that "\b" is not matching the backspace character as it ought.
This is from the AWK info document:

   2. Data types, conversion and comparison
       There  are  two  basic  data  types,  numeric  and string.
       Numeric constants can be integer  like  -2,  decimal  like
       1.08,  or  in  scientific  notation like -1.1e4 or .28E-3.
       All numbers are represented internally  and  all  computa<AD>
       tions are done in floating point arithmetic.  So for exam<AD>
       ple, the expression 0.2e2 == 20 is true and true is repre<AD>
       sented as 1.0.

       String constants are enclosed in double quotes.

            "This is a string with a newline at the end.\n"

       Strings can be continued across a line by escaping (\) the
       newline.  The following escape sequences are recognized.

            \\        \
            \"        "
            \a        alert, ascii 7
            \b        backspace, ascii 8
            \t        tab, ascii 9
            \n        newline, ascii 10
            \v        vertical tab, ascii 11
            \f        formfeed, ascii 12
            \r        carriage return, ascii 13
            \ddd      1, 2 or 3 octal digits for ascii ddd
            \xhh      1 or 2 hex digits for ascii  hh

The \xhh doesn't do anything either:
Nabarlek:~# echo -e 'a\ba' | sed -e  's=\x61.==' | xxd
0000000: 6108 610a                                a.a.
N
-- 
Cheers
John Summerfield

Microsoft's most solid OS: http://www.geocities.com/rcwoolley/

Note: mail delivered to me is deemed to be intended for me, for my disposition.

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