Question

I’ve just stumbled upon some cryptic sed expression in a legacy script. Could you give me some hints how to start decoding it?

Best thing would be some automatic tool translating sed incantations to English, but for a close runner up, I’d be very grateful for some nice index of (all) sed commands. Otherwise, I’m certainly highly interested in any help at all on how to quickly attack the problem (other than having to read the manual cover to cover…).

(Side note: as you may have guessed, I don’t want to just paste the expression here, as I’d like to be able to do it easier and faster next time I stumble on some similar line noise…)

I’d be very grateful for help!

Edit: regexps themselves aren’t problem, by the way, I’m good enough at them.

Answer 1

i don’t think there is automatic tool that can ‘transalte’ sed commands to english. however you may want to check http://aurelio.net/sedsed/ . it will help you to understand one sed script, what it does, and how.

anyway, if you list some examples would be good.