Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!pacbell!ames!xanth!ginosko!uunet!virtech!cpcahil
From: cpcahil@virtech.UUCP (Conor P. Cahill)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: sed behaves differently when run in backquotes/subshell
Keywords: `sed`, sh, microport_system_V/AT
Message-ID: <958@virtech.UUCP>
Date: 8 Aug 89 00:23:04 GMT
References: <350@tree.UUCP>
Organization: Virtual Technologies Inc
Lines: 12

In article <350@tree.UUCP>, stever@tree.UUCP (Steve Rudek) writes:
> I needed a shell script which would take strings of letters and alphabetize
> them into a single line and sed + sort seemed like the best choice.  But I find 
> that sed performs differently when part of a pipeline not explicitly in a
> subshell than it does when run in backquotes.  What's the problem?

  It is not set which mis-behaves, but the shell.  When you run in the `sub-shell`
  the "^j" is eaten by the shell command line processing.  A different mechanism
  would be to use the tilde instead of the <return> and then translate the 
  tilde to a <return>.  For ex:

	GUESSES=`cat .TST | sed 's/\(.\)/\1~/g' | tr "~" "\012" | sort....