GnuWin News

An MS-Windows (Win32) port of Sed-4.0.6 is available from
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net

Sed is a stream editor.
Changes from the previous Win32 port (3.02.80) are:

Sed 4.0.6

• added parameter to `v' for the version of sed that is expected.

• configure switch --without-included-regex to use the system regex matcher

• fix for -i option under Cygwin

Sed 4.0.5

• portability fixes

• improvements to some error messages (e.g. y/abc/defg/ incorrectly said
  excess characters after command' instead ofy arguments have different
  lengths')

• a',i', l',L', r' accept two addresses except in POSIXLY_CORRECT mode. Onlyq' and `Q' do not accept two address in standard (GNU) mode.

Sed 4.0.4

• documentation fixes

• update regex matcher

Sed 4.0.3

• fix packaging problem (two missing translation catalogs)

Sed 4.0.2

• more translations

• fix build problems (vpath builds and bootstrap builds)

Sed 4.0.1

• Remove last vestiges of super-sed

• man page automatically built

• more translations provided

• portability improvements

Sed 4.0

• Update regex matcher

Sed 3.96

• `y' command supports multibyte character sets

• Update regex matcher

Sed 3.95

• `R' command reads a single line from a file.

• CR-LF pairs are always ignored under Windows, even if (under Cygwin)
  a disk is mounted as binary.

• More attention to errors on stdout

• New `W' command to write first line of pattern space to a file

• Can customize line wrap width on single `l' commands

• L' command formats and reflows paragraphs likefmt' does.

• The test suite makefiles are better organized (this change is
  transparent however).

• Compiles and bootstraps out-of-the-box under MinGW32 and Cygwin.

• Optimizes cases when pattern space is truncated at its start or at
  its end by `D' or by a substitution command with an empty RHS.
  For example scripts like this,

  seq 1 10000 | tr \n \ | ./sed ':a; s/^[0-9][0-9]* //; ta'

whose behavior was quadratic with previous versions of sed, have
now linear behavior.

• New command `e' to pipe the output of a command into the output
  of sed.

• New option e' to pass the output of thes' command through the
  Bourne shell and get the result into pattern space.

• Switched to obstacks in the parser -- less memory-related bugs
  (there were none AFAIK but you never know) and less memory usage.

• New option -i, to support in-place editing a la Perl. Usually one
  had to use ed or, for more complex tasks, resort to Perl; this is
  not necessary anymore.

• Dumped buffering code. The performance loss is 10%, but it caused
  bugs in systems with CRLF termination. The current solution is
  not definitive, though.

• Bug fix: Made the behavior of s/A*/x/g (i.e. `s' command with a
  possibly empty LHS) more consistent:

  pattern GNU sed 3.x GNU sed 4.x
  B xBx xBx
  BC xBxCx xBxCx
  BAC xBxxCx xBxCx
  BAAC xBxxCx xBxCx

• Bug fix: the // empty regular expressions now refers to the last
  regular expression that was matched, rather than to the last
  regular expression that was compiled. This richer behavior seems
  to be the correct one (albeit neither one is POSIXLY_CORRECT).

• Check for invalid backreferences in the RHS of the `s' command
  (e.g. s/1234/\1/)

• Support for [lLuUE] in the RHS of the `s' command like in Perl.

• New regular expression matcher

• Bug fix: if a file was redirected to be stdin, sed did not consume
  it. So
  (sed d; sed G) < TESTFILE

double-spaced TESTFILE, while the equivalent `useless use of cat'
cat TESTFILE | (sed d; sed G)

printed nothing (which is the correct behavior). A test for this
bug was added to the test suite.

• The documentation is now much better, with a few examples provided,
  and a thorough description of regular expressions. The manual often
  refers to "GNU extensions", but if they are described here they are
  specific to this version.

• Documented command-line option:
  -r, --regexp-extended
  Use extended regexps -- e.g. (abc+) instead of (abc+)

• Added feature to the w' command and to thew' option of the `s'
  command: if the file name is /dev/stderr, it means the standard
  error (inspired by awk); and similarly for /dev/stdout. This is
  disabled if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.

• Added m' andM' modifiers to s' command for multi-line matching (Perl-style); in addresses, onlyM' works.

• Added Q' command forsilent quit'; added ability to pass
  an exit code from a sed script to the caller.

• Added T' command forbranch if failed'.

• Added `v' command, which is a do-nothing intended to fail on
  seds that do not support GNU sed 4.0's extensions.