Re: sed ssed bug with the windows binaries

[Manuel Collado]

Eli Zaretskii escribió:
> > Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:46:22 +0100
> > From: Guillaume Frambourg <address@hidden>
> >
> > Working sed is :
> > --------------------------------------------------------
> > sed -e "s/\"//g" test.txt
> > --------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > it outputs :
> > --------------------------------------------------------
> > hello
> > --------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > But if you try :
> > --------------------------------------------------------
> > sed -e "s/\"//g" test.txt > test2.txt
> > --------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > it outputs :
> > --------------------------------------------------------
> > hello
> > sed: can't read >: Invalid argument
>
> That's not a problem with Sed, this is a problem with the Windows
> shell's too naive handling of quotes.  The Windows shell doesn't
> understand the backslash escape, so it thinks the second quote closes
> the first one, and the 3rd one quotes everything up to the end of the
> command.

The DJGPP port of set works OK, because it parse the command line 
itself. But both the Cygwin and the MinGW ports emit the given error 
message.

> The escape character of the Windows shell is `^'.  However, it doesn't
> escape inside quoted strings :-(.  So you need to get creative.  For
> example:
>
>   sed -e "s/"^""//g" test.txt > test2.txt
>
> This quotes parts of the Sed expression separately, with the literal
> quote escaped by `^'.

This does not work for me. It seems that quotes in the command line must 
always be in pairs. I.e. there must be an even number of quotes in each 
argument. The workaround is to use the octal escape code for the quote 
character:

sed -e "s/\042//g" test.txt > test2.txt


Hope this helps.
--
Manuel Collado - http://lml.ls.fi.upm.es/~mcollado