Re: sed segfaults

[Paolo Bonzini]

[I've CCed the sed mailing list too]

> sed -e 's/\'.*\'/foo/' input.txt

The correct behavior is to output fooxxx. \'.*\' means the end of pattern
space, followed by zero or more characters, followed by the end of pattern
space -- so the end of pattern space.  (The current version BTW is 4.0.8).

I am baffled by the new GNU regex matcher.  I did fix some bugs and find
more, but I cannot keep up with it.  It is a great piece of technology but a
sane maintainer would already have reverted it until it become at least more
stable.  But it looks like very talented people sometimes do not look at the
problems and bug reports that they are putting on the back of sed and awk
maintainers.

The only hint (and request for help) that I can give you is to try out sed
4.0a and help making it into 4.1: as soon as it is released, I will do a new
ssed release.  Slackware has already adopted ssed as their default sed,
maybe if more distros did that it would make the matter more clear to the
glibc guys.

Sorry for writing a message with more political (in the worst sense) content
than help for your problems (besides, I think that you were just adding some
extra backslashes...)

Paolo