Re: PCRE mode for sed

On Mon, 2012-11-05 at 18:12 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> How about packaging a psed that always uses PCREs?  That way, there's
> no problem with standardization:  sed is sed, psed is not.
Sounds fine in principle...

From the user side I'd even like that more, as psed is shorter than sed
-P.
Actually I always have a alias pgrep="grep -P" definition.


From a technical side I'd consider it less beautiful... another binary
doing rather the same than sed already does,... with similar
interface/options. There's always the chance that changes to one won't
hit the other.
But that's a matter personal taste I guess.


Maybe a third solution could be considered:
- Put the "main code" for supporting PCRE into the sed binary,
supporting builds with static/dynamic linking and with dlopen (perhaps
the one can avoid major problems by looking at how problems were solved
with grep).

- Adding a psed binary (or actually a symlink should be enough), which
is only created when PCRE support is available (guaranteeing that, would
again be the job of the distro) and automatically implies -P
Has the advantage that scripts could check for psed and use it only when
it exists.


Cheers,
Chris.