Re: Either I do something wrong or there is a regexp bug in sed !!

You are right. My mistake. This indeed works:

sed -E -e "s/^[0-9]+/199/" conf-split > conf-split.new

Thanks for clearing this up.

Zoltan

> On Sun, 2004-11-14 at 18:39, Zoltan Frombach wrote:
>> match anything! After spending like an hour investigating this, I 
>> realized
>> that the + after my bracket expression ( I'm talking about this part 
>> here:
>
> Normal.
>
>> According to the sed man page, the regexp syntax that is used by sed is
>> documented in the re_format man page. And according to the re_format man
>> page: "A piece is an atom possibly followed by a single= `*', `+', `?', 
>> or
>
> You need to read it more carefully.  There are two kinds of regular
> expressions, "basic" and "extended".  sed, ed, and grep speak BRE
> syntax, whereas awk and egrep speak ERE syntax.  + is special only in
> ERE syntax.
>
> (And then there's GNU, where the difference between BRE and ERE is that
> some things use a preceding backslash in BRE and don't in ERE, and vice
> versa, so GNU sed does what you want if you use \+ instead of +.)
>
> -- 
> brandon s. allbery    [linux,solaris,freebsd,perl]     allbery_at_kf8nh.com
> system administrator      [WAY too many hats]        allbery_at_ece.cmu.edu
> electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon univ.         KF8NH