Very Computer

Hi :
I have a question with sed script files. I have a script file that is
700 lines long . Sed doesnt take in more than 200 line long script files
- so i split the sed.cmds into 4 smaller files. But now, sed refuses to
take in multiple script files.

If I give something like

sed -f s.cmds* blahblah.sdl

where there are s.cmdsaa and s.cmdsab files in the directory.
it tries to run s.cmdsaa on s.cmdsab and blahblah.sdl but doesnt take in
s.cmdsab as a script file. Is there a way to do this ?  I would
appreciate if some one could help me fast !

Thanks a ton

--Mouli

Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.

The -f option interprets just the next argument as a command file, so if you
want more than one command file, you must have more than one -f option, as
in

sed -f s.cmdsaa -f s.cmdsab ....

So, after the shell does its filename expansions, sed will see
the command line:
  sed -f s.cmdsaa s.cmdsab s.cmdsac s.cmdsad blahblah.sdl
and interprets only the file named immediately after the "-f"
as the name of a sed script, and the remaining files as inputs
(as you discovered).

Then if you change that to:
  sed -f s.cmdsaa -f s.cmdsab -f s.cmdsac -f s.cmdsad blahblah.sdl
you wind up with a single 700 line sed script, that just happens
to reside in four seperate files.  No win there.

If your four s.cmdsa? files are self-contained sed scriptlets
(without, say, splitting a command block across file boundaries
or the need to do inter-file branching) then you could:
  sed -f s.cmdsaa blahblah.sdl | sed -f s.cmdsab |
    sed -f s.cmdsac | sed -f s.cmdsad

Perhaps a better option is to switch to a sed which does not
have such an arbritrary restriction on the number of statements
in a script, such as GNU sed.

                --Ken Pizzini