> For example, you repeat the following sed on it until it > doesn't change any more: > > [snip]
You can use the t command to avoid looping. However, while indeed a bit of a hassle, doing arithmetic with sed is not so hard... You can use 10 commands to sum two numbers: http://sed.sourceforge.net/grabbag/scripts/add_decs.sed is quite slow, but there's a 30 command one at http://sed.sourceforge.net/grabbag/scripts/add_decs-nolt.sed. If shell functions could be used... hmmm, now that 2.59 is out it may be time to revive my shell functions patches... may I just recall the 30% decrease in the size of configure scripts??? Paolo