Re: Sed failure in contrib/sboxes on MacOS

[Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri]

On Tue, Oct 26, 2021 at 11:56:47PM +0200, Kusalananda Kähäri wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 26, 2021 at 12:47:49PM +0200, Axel Kielhorn wrote:
[cut]
> > Later I get:
> > 
> > sed: 1: "1i .lf 1 contrib/sboxes ...": command i expects \ followed by text
> 
> 
> This is from another GNU sed convinience feature taht allows you to
> insert text with the i command on the same line as the command itself:
> 
>       1i\ .lf 1
> 
> With POSIX sed, that needs to be written
> 
>       1i\
>       .lf 1
> 
> Now, looking at the Makefile or Makefile.in, at around line 4538 (search
> for where DOC_SED is being used), it seems as if someone has tried to
> write this properly, with a literal newline and everything.  The only
> issue is that Make will remove that literal newline, which turns it into
> a sed expression that only GNU sed understands.
> 
>       DOC_GROFF = $(DOC_SED) -e '1i\
>       .lf 1 $<' $< | $(DOC_GROFF_ONLY)
> 
> The above is turned into something like
> 
>       LANG=C LC_ALL=C sed -e "...blah blah..." -e '1i\n .lf 1 ...etc.'
> 
> which on my OpenBSD system generates
> 
>       sed: 1: "1i\n .lf 1 doc/webpage.ms": extra characters after \ at the 
> end of i command
> 
> Instead, that line in the Makefile should look like
> 
>       DOC_GROFF = $(DOC_SED) -e '1i\' -e '.lf 1 $<' $< | $(DOC_GROFF_ONLY)
> 
> That is, break the single expression string up into two.


Actually, that only makes it work with OpenBSD sed and GNU sed.  It still fails 
with

        sed: Unrecognized command: .lf 1 doc/webpage.ms

when using Plan 9 sed.  Not tested with macOS.

So it looks like the best bet is to insert a literal newline somehow,
after the \ like the Makefile *tries* to do.  How to do that properly is
unfortunately beyond me as I don't grock Make quoting rules very well.

> 
> I've only tested with OpenBSD sed.
> 
> > 
> > Sed doesn’t tell me its version but the man pages says March 27, 2017.
> > 
> > Greetings
> > 
> > Axel
> 
> -- 
> Andreas (Kusalananda) Kähäri
> SciLifeLab, NBIS, ICM
> Uppsala University, Sweden
> 
> .

-- 
Andreas (Kusalananda) Kähäri
SciLifeLab, NBIS, ICM
Uppsala University, Sweden

.