Re: proposed Autoconf patch so that "configure" need not use Awk

[Akim Demaille]

>>>>> "Paul" == Paul Eggert <address@hidden> writes:

First, Paul, thanks a lot for the time you devote to my education, it
is precious!


Paul> We're peering into the origin of Unix here.  I knew people at
Paul> Bell Labs though I never worked there myself.  The late Lee
Paul> E. McMahon, the original author of 'sed', was a fellow student
Paul> at Rice University in the early 1970s before he went off to Bell
Paul> Labs to write 'sed'.  

Aha!  I knew it!  Having such a clumsy syntax was necessarily the
result of some student project :) :)

Paul> McMahon and the late Joe Ossanna (who wrote 'troff') were the
Paul> two guys who convinced management to buy a new PDP-11 computer
Paul> for word processing, an important milestone in the original
Paul> development of Unix.

Wow!


>> In any case, I'm surprised by s/ $//;s/.*\n//.  I would be less
>> surprised, I guess, with s/ $//g;s/.*\n//.

Paul> You don't want the 'g', because that would remove trailing white
Paul> space from the input script.  

Yep, now that I understand $ better, it's clear to me the g is not
necessary.  But I don't understand why you say it would erase all the
trailing spaces.  It would only apply to that in the pattern space,
wouldn't it?  Then /1 and /g are the same, since there is only a
single occurrence of ` $'.


Paul> Great!  I installed it, along with some commentary and minor
Paul> changes suggested by the above discussion.  Here's the patch I
Paul> installed:

Thanks Paul!  It's nice material.