On OSX, the system sed
seems, at times, a bit limited regarding regular expressions and some escape characters — so much, that I end up using perl -pe
a fair bit of the time, and now I’m wondering if I should care about using sed
at all.
I usually need this when piping a lot of commands in a row, usually calling sed
and perl
multiple times during its execution, and I’d like to know if I should use sed
when it does the job, using perl
only when it is necessary. I’m interested in this from a performance point of view (having multiple commands of this kind in a script can make a difference in the end), but if there are any other considerations you deem worthy of mentioning, they’re welcome, naturally.
Perl is probably a bit slower than sed
(but not by much — it is a very fast scripting language); however, if Perl does what you need and sed
doesn't, use Perl.
Note that Perl is (still) distributed with the programs s2p
and a2p
which convert sed
and awk
scripts respectively into Perl. So you can devise your script in sed
and then automatically translate to Perl (and adapt to exploit enhanced Perl regular expressions, etc).
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