On Wed, 26 Nov 1997, Dale Scheetz wrote: > Personally, I find the "off topic" threads on this list are often very > interesting. I almost always learn some new twist or trick that I had not > seen before, so it is my hope that, when I have problems, the solution may > be valuable to others as well.
I agree with you here, Dale. It is very refreshing to read the occasional thread about sed instead of the umpteenth ppp problem saga (no offense to people harvesting this list for answers to their ppp problems intended.) And besides, this hasn't even turned into a sed vs. perl. vs tr vs. who knows what obscure guineapig-tool... yet. > > Your problem is that the inner quotes don't add another level quoting, but > > take away another level of quoting. To be a little clearer: > > > > > sed -e 's/'\t'/ /g' <infile >outfile > > ^^ ^^^^ are the quoted parts. > > > > The \t is not quoted, but is interpreted by your shell, which replaces the > > \t > > with an actual t. If you take out the inner quotes, it should work: > > sed -e 's/\t/ /g' <infile >outfile After some messing around, I found that you actualy mustn't escape the tab to sed, you only have to get it through bash. Just type Ctrl-V TAB and that puts a tab character in your sed command string. Don't use ' or \ characters at all. The other problem has me puzzled: you can easily remove the trailing - from any line with the 's/-$//g' command, but I don't know how to get rid of the newlines. I'm even looking in the sed&awk book and I still don't get a clue :-( Before people start flooding this thread with nifty perl one-liners, I would really like to see how this is done with sed. Cheers, Joost PS: I think I found something that you can do with the N command. I'm not going to try it now because it's time to go home. Maybe later unless someone already solves it today. -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .