Re: non portable sed scripts

[Paul Eggert]

Ralf Wildenhues <address@hidden> writes:

> So IMHO I wouldn't mind if only the bugfix and documentation parts of
> the patch below were committed.

Thanks very much for the analysis.  I agree with your conclusion for
Autoconf 2.60.  But we definitely need to revisit this afterwards,
since my impression is that sed size-related gotchas are becoming more
and more common (see, for example,
<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2006-05/msg00127.html>,
which has exactly this problem and which closely preceded your message
in my email inbox).

Switching to awk sounds like a win to me, as awk is more expressive
than sed is.  In the old days this would have been problematic due to
the incompatibilities between traditional and POSIX Awk, but nowadays
we can assume an almost-POSIX-complaint awk, if we run AC_PROG_AWK.