Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!hplabs!hpcea!hpccc!lufkin
From: lufkin@hpccc.HP.COM (Paul Lufkin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: MKS vi bug
Message-ID: <5060020@hpccc.HP.COM>
Date: 28 Mar 88 17:08:15 GMT
References: <3706@killer.UUCP>
Organization: HP Application Support Division
Lines: 29

...since this seems to be the MKS vi string:

I'm having trouble manipulating strings containing the pipe ( "|" ) 
with MKS regular expressions in vi/ex and sed.

In other implementations of UN*X ex, the command    1,$s/||/:/g
would change all occurences of "||" to ":".

In MKS vi I get the error message 'Badly constructed regular expression'.
Escaping the |'s does not help (ie. /\|\|/ ), nor does setting 'nomagic'.

If I try the substitution from MKS sed, my PC hangs without error message 
and must be rebooted.

Interestingly enough, I *was* able to pattern match and make the desired
substitutions with MKS awk using the 'sub' string function.

Any suggestions?

Environment:
-------------------------------------------
PC:  HP Vectra ES 12 (12 MHz AT workalike)
DOS: MS-DOS 3.2
VI:  VI/EX 3.5 compatible.  MKS Toolkit release 2.2
Shell: c:\dos\command.com

Paul Lufkin, Jr.
Hewlett-Packard Application Support Division
lufkin@hpccc or [hpda|hpfcla]!hpwcso!paul
(415) 691-5780