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Message-ID: <3F155A90.2173F884@dessent.net>
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 07:00:48 -0700
From: Brian Dessent <brian AT dessent DOT net>
Organization: My own little world...
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To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: Cygwin's vanilla sed : capabilities and limitations
References: <000701c34b9a$1c7e6c80$6fc82486 AT medschool DOT dundee DOT ac DOT uk>
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fergus AT bonhard DOT uklinux DOT net wrote:

> Q1. Querying info sed reveals the expression matcher to be "greedy",
> matching the longest possible string. Is there a way to make it match the
> shortest possible, so that echo aaabbbccc | sed 's/^.*b//' (altered but
> similar) grabs aaab not aaabbb?

If you have perl available (or just a tool that uses perl-compatible
regexps, i.e. grep -P) you can add the '?' character after any qualifier
to get the non-greedy version, i.e. '*?' is the non-greedy '*', '??' is
the non-greedy '?', etc.  But this is a feature of pcre, which I don't
believe applies to sed in any shape or form.  However, most sed scripts
are pretty easy to do in perl with little modification, so if you
require this function that's what I'd do.

Brian

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