Re: Be nice if you guys could explain what the \<newline> sequence is.

[Bob Proulx]

Please keep responses to the entire group and not to me privately.
This is so that everyone can share in the discussion.

Xeno Campanoli wrote:
> First of all, I fixed my problem with tr, which was also a man page problem,
> but I figured it out from an example on the WEB.  I guess you can't depend
> on man pages as much anymore because the WEB is what people really look at,
> but it would sure be nice.  

The complete manual is available as info documentation.  The current
states the following in the man page:

       The full documentation for sed is maintained as a Texinfo manual.  If
       the info and sed programs are properly installed at your site, the
       command

              info sed

       should give you access to the complete manual.

I believe your request is already handled by the info documentation.

> Anyway, sorry if I misstated my problem.  Below is what I found.  I presume
> I should have been able to use the sed "y" command to do the same as tr did
> (I was trying to remove newlines, which is addressed under miscellaneous
> notes below).  The version I got from sed -v was 3.02, and here is the man
> page bottom:

Okay.  But 'sed' 3 is rather old.  Please consider upgrading.  The
current version is 4.1.4 available here:

  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/sed/

Bob


> Miscellaneous notes
>        This version of sed supports a \<newline> sequence in  all
>        regular  expressions, the replacement part of a substitute
>        (s) command, and  in  the  source  and  dest  parts  of  a
>        transliterate  (y)  command.   The  \ is stripped, and the
>        newline is kept.
> 
> SEE ALSO
>        awk(1), ed(1), expr(1), emacs(1), perl(1),  tr(1),  vi(1),
>        regex(5) [well, one ought to be written... XXX], sed.info,
>        any of various books on sed, the sed FAQ
>        (http://www.dbnet.ece.ntua.gr/~george/sed/sedfaq.html,
>        http://www.ptug.org/sed/sedfaq.htm).
> 
> BUGS
>        E-mail bug reports to address@hidden  Be sure to
>        include the word ``sed'' somewhere in the ``Subject:''
>        field.
> 
> GNU Project                 1998-05-07                     SED(1)
> (END)
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bob Proulx [mailto:address@hidden 
> Sent: Saturday, July 09, 2005 8:57 AM
> To: Xeno Campanoli
> Cc: address@hidden
> Subject: Re: Be nice if you guys could explain what the \<newline> sequence
> is.
> 
> Xeno Campanoli wrote:
> > I can't guess for the life of me.  I've tried everything I can think of
> that
> > you might possibly mean.  Please see the man sed page.
> 
> For what version of sed?  Please say the version of the sed manual
> that you are looking at and repeat the text from the manual that is
> unclear.
> 
> I looked at the manual on my Debian distribution:
> 
>   NAME
>         sed - manual page for sed version 4.1.3
> 
> Then I looked at every reference to newline in the manual.  I did not
> see anything that matched \<newline> anywhere in the manual.
> Therefore I am guessing this is some formatting problem with your
> version of the manual.
> 
> In any case, a newline sequence is:
> 
>   Oct   Dec   Hex   Char
>   ----------------------
>   012   10    0A    LF  '\n'
> 
> That is the character that separates lines in files.
> 
> Bob