Re: config.status - robust sed substitutions

[Robert Anderson]

On Wed, 2003-02-26 at 22:30, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Robert Anderson <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > However, note that _any_ new choice of delimiter will not only fail for
> > the case of the chosen character, but will also fail for the characters
> > '&' and '\' which are always metacharacters on the RHS of a sed
> > expression.
> 
> '\' we can't do much about here, though we can print an error message
> and exit.  It's pretty rare to find it in file names, outside of
> DOS-based systems, and those guys can always use '/' as it's
> equivalent.  And anyway '\' will break half the code in autoconf
> regardless, as it uses 'echo', so I'm not too worried about
> disallowing '\' in file names.
> 
> '&' we can defang by using '&' as the delimiter.  '&', like '|',
> rarely occurs in file names because it also is a shell metacharacter.
> So, how about if we use '&'?

>From the various solutions of "use a different character", I'd say '|'
has the best balance of "unlikely to be used" and "doesn't terribly
obfuscate the source".

That's cool by me.

Thanks for patiently putting up with this debate,
Bob