Cygwin's vanilla sed : capabilities and limitations

[<fergus at bonhard dot uklinux dot net>]

This is probably a cheat question (non-central Cygwin issue) but it is about
Cygwin's vanilla sed.

AND it is only asked in order eventually to provide anybody interested with
the elegant-est possible script for making a portable Cygwin CD.

Q1. Querying info sed reveals the expression matcher to be "greedy",
matching the longest possible string. Is there a way to make it match the
shortest possible, so that echo aaabbbccc | sed 's/^.*b//' (altered but
similar) grabs aaab not aaabbb?

Q2. Is there a way using the supplied sed without major enhancements to
change "abc x def" to "def x abc": that is, to grab two distinct portions
and swap them (using $1,$2 or \1,\2 or whatever).

Sorry for asking: I know it's a sin: hope the end articulated above
justifies the means.

Fergus


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