Nick Gearls wrote: > > If using the "q" switch to not flatten the buckets, it uses almost no > memory. Btw, it correctly handles more 60 substitutions on the same line > (some shorter, some longer) without the q flag !?! When exactly is this > flag needed?
The "q" switch causes the pattern to fail every time the match pattern spans two filter input buffers. So it's very hit-or-miss and you have no assurance that it can process this all. Since the filter is built for text, and text is generally arranged with lines short than 300KB, I wouldn't spend a bunch of time on this. Take a look at httpd trunk's mod_sed and see if the real thing is kinder with respect to memory utilization; it truly is a stream editor.
