Question

I have sed running with the following argument fine if I copy and paste this into an open shell:

cat test.txt | sed '/[,0-9]\{0,\}[0-9]\{1,\}[acd][0-9]\{1,\}[,0-9]\{0,\}/{N
s/[,0-9]\{0,\}[0-9]\{1,\}[acd][0-9]\{1,\}[,0-9]\{0,\}\n\-\-\-//}'

The problem is that when I try to move this into a KornShell (ksh) script, the ksh throws errors because of what I think is that new line character. Can anyone give me a hand with this? FYI: the regular expression is supposed to be a multiple line replacement.

Thank you!

Answer 1

This: \{0,\} can be replaced by this: *

This: \{1,\} can be replaced by this: \+

It’s not necessary to escape hyphens.

The newline can be replaced by -e (or by a semicolon)

The cat can be replaced by using the filename as an argument to sed

The result:

sed -e '/[,0-9]*[0-9]\+[acd][0-9]\+[,0-9]*/{N' -e 's/[,0-9]*[0-9]\+[acd][0-9]\+[,0-9]*\n---//}' test.txt

or

sed '/[,0-9]*[0-9]\+[acd][0-9]\+[,0-9]*/{N;s/[,0-9]*[0-9]\+[acd][0-9]\+[,0-9]*\n---//}' test.txt

(untested)