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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

sed doesn't support the same PCRE regex ack or ag

No, but the `-r` option makes it use extended regex[1]. Here's some PCRE:

    cat file | perl -ne 'print if s/(\w+) (\d+)/\1 is \2 years old/'

My only point is sometimes old school standard tools are plenty.

1: https://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/sed.html#Extended-re...

Right...but there's a point in having a tool that does PCRE, and all the things useful in grep, in one command, rather than kicking out to Perl.

Agreed, it's nice to consolidate disparate functionality into a single invocation.

But when I saw mVChr's sed line, and then again the perl line, I was reminded "Oh, right, old school." And I wondered for the Nth time how much of old school has been unknowingly reinvented, and how many times.

Nevertheless, I like the new(er) tools in this thread too.

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