Bug in Win32 port of sed

[Martin Schulze]

Hello,

after wasting a couple of hours trying to fix my so supposed bug in the cmd 
file that I wrote, I just figured out that it more likely is a bug in the GNU 
Win32 port of of newer versions. At least I'd call it strange behaviour. This 
is present in the following implementations:

- Karl Syring's sed v3.02 from http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/
- Erics Pement's super-sed v3.59 from
  http://www.student.northpark.edu/pemente/sed/index.htm
- Other GNU-based implementations like that in MSYS (MinGW)

The bug can be easily verified:

1. Use or create a text file and make sure it has at least one or more double 
quotation marks (") in the text body (not in the file name).

2. Execute the following command from within cmd.exe shell to filter the 
quotation marks:

sed s!\"!!g file

where file is the name of the test file you used.

This will give the expected output on the screen. But as soon as you try to 
redirect or pipe the output, you will get errors:

sed s!\"!!g file >anyfile

The above command fails:

sed: can't read >anyfile: Invalid argument

BTW, there is a GNU sed v3.02.80 alpha release floating around that does NOT 
have this bug. This one is explicitely claimed to be buggy on Eric's site but 
at least it's working fine for me at least in this case. I downloaded the 
precompiled DOS version by Eli Zaretskii from Eric's mirror site:
http://www.student.northpark.edu/pemente/sed/sed3028a.zip

The test case with redirect executes just fine without any errors with this 
alpha version.

Regards,

Martin Schulze
Germaniastr. 243
45355 Essen, Germany