Question

C:\crp\cnp>sed -V

GNU sed version 3.02

Copyright (C) 1998 Free Software Foundation, Inc.......


C:\crp\cnp>type f.f

a a a

a a a

Trying to replace ‘a’ with spaces.

C:\crp\cnp>type f.f | sed -e s/a/\d032/g

d032 d032 d032

d032 d032 d032

why isn’t it working?

I don’t mind whether i’m finding or replacing spaces or new lines.. I just want to be able to specify them. It doesn’t seem to be working and I don’t know why.

(Replacing spaces or a space, with f, doesn’t work)

C:\crp\cnp>echo a a | sed s/\d32/f/
a a

Note- it seems it might work in 4.2 , But i’m interested in 3.02 ‘cos that’s the version bundled with unxutils http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/

Update to question-
thanks for paxdiablo’s tip.. about gnu32win, I am now using that instead of unxutils. It is more up to date. I can now specify spaces. And tip of ghostdog, and paxdiablo, I see about the double quotes. I am fine specifying spaces with \d(since using 4.2) or with a space.
But, I still can’t remove new lines

C:\crp>type f.f | sed -e “s/\r\n/f/g”

a aa

b bb

c cc

C:\crp>type f.f | sed -e “s/\d013\d010/f/g”

a aa

b bb

c cc

C:\crp>type f.f | sed -e “s/\x0D\x0A/f/g”

a aa

b bb

c cc

Note: This question was from 2010. Now it’s 2020. Gnuwin32 is out of date(like the last time its Gnuwin32 sed was updated was 2010, with Sed 4.2.1 which was from 2009), Unxutils is even more out of date. So Gnuwin32 as of writing is a decade out of date, and Unxutils is more like 2 decades out of date, as of 2020. Cygwin is still kept up to date and as of writing is on Sed v 4.4 which is from 2017.

Answer 1

Why aren’t you just using a space character itself rather than some funny encoding? As in:

sed -e 's/a/ /g'

For what it’s worth, the command you gave also fails to work in 4.2.1 but, if you add in the quotes, it does work. So I suggest you change it to:

sed -e 's/a/\d032/g'

---

Apologies, I’ve just noticed you’re running Windows so you’ve probably got CygWin or GnuWin32 (or equivalent).

Quotes work differently under Windows so you should try two things. The first is to use " instead of ' quotes:

sed -e "s/a/ /g"

Otherwise, the escape character in Windows is ^ so something like this should be able to escape the space:

sed -e s/a/^ /g

---

As an aside, I’d be looking to switch to GnuWin32, if possible, which has more recent versions of sed (for example). It doesn’t look like UnxUtils has had an update since 2003 based on that web page you link to. You can get individual packages from here. You’re looking for coreutils which contains the bulk of the UNIX text processing toolkit.

But, if you’re stuck with UnxUtils, I’d just use the actual space rather than a decimal code, and then I’d use tr to get rid of new lines:

tr -d "\n"

assuming of course that the tr in textutils can handle that syntax 🙂