trinkle@cs.purdue.edu (06/05/91)
For some reason, Sun apparently changed the behavior of the "p"
flag for the "s" command. In BSD 4.3 and derived systems, the p flag
causes the new pattern to be copied to stdout if a replacement is
made. The SunOS 4.0.3 and 4.1.1 documentation imply this is still the
case
(2)s/regular expression/replacement/flags
Substitute the replacement string for instances
of the regular expression in the pattern space.
Any character may be used instead of `/'. For a
fuller description see ed(1). flags is zero or
more of:
n n= 1 - 512. Substitute for just the
nth occurrence of the
regularexpression.
g Global: substitute for all nonover-
lapping instances of the regular
expression rather than just the
first one.
p Print the pattern space if a
replacement was made.
w wfilename Write: append the pattern space to
wfilename if a replacement was made.
But in fact, it is not true. The pattern is copied to stdout
ONLY if the -n option was specified on the command line. I have
looked at both the 4.0.3 and 4.1.1 source code, and it is clearly
deliberate.
I am not that familiar with the SysV version of sed. Is this
merely a compatibility issue with SysV that is incorrectly documented,
or did Sun gratuitously decide to change a very basic utility?
Daniel Trinkle trinkle@cs.purdue.edu
Dept. of Computer Sciences {backbone}!purdue!trinkle
Purdue University 317-494-7844
West Lafayette, IN 47907