Bug in sed(1)?

[Sam Kendall]

In article <685 at ttrdc.UUCP>, levy at ttrdc.UUCP (Daniel R. Levy) writes:
> I have encountered what I THINK is a bug in sed(1)....
> 
> Specifically, it involves expressions of the form '1,/^fixed_pattern$/d'....
> 
> Unfortunately, this seems to fail when the first line of the input exactly
> matches fixed_pattern; then, instead of only the first line of the input
> being discarded, ALL the lines of input are discarded.

As another news item noted, this is documented behavior.  To work around
it, prepend a blank line to the input stream:

	( echo; cat ) | sed '1,/^fixed_pattern$/d'

This does exactly what you want.

I think it is possible to work around this in a single sed process,
using the pattern space, but I the result would be very ugly!

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