sed command is working in solaris but not in Linux

Question

I am new to shell scripting and sed command.

The following sed command is working in Solaris but giving error in Linux:

sed -n 's/^[a-zA-z0-9][a-zA-z0-9]*[ ][ ]*\([0-9][0-9]*\).*[/]dir1[/]subdir1\).*/\2:\1/p'

The error is :

sed: -e expression #1, char 79: Invalid range end

I have no clue why it is giving invalid range end error.

Answer 1

It seems like Linux Sed doesn't like your Az (twice). It doesn't really make sense, anyway.

Use [AZ] (upper-case Z)

Answer 2

As blue112 said, Az as a range makes no sense. Solaris sed is interpreting this as "the ASCII code for A through the ASCII code for z ", in which case you could have unintended matches. AZ occurs before az in ASCII, but there are a few characters falling between Z and a .

59 Y
5a Z
----
5b [
5c \
5d ]
5e ^
5f _
60 `
----
61 a
62 b

Here is an example showing Solaris sed (Solaris 8 in this case). Given this range, it substitutes _ and \\ as well as the alphabetics you were apparently targeting.

% echo "f3oo_Ba\\r" | /usr/bin/sed  's/[A-z]/./g';echo
.3.....

(Note that the 3 was not substituted as it does not fall into the specified ASCII range.)

GNU sed is protecting you from shooting yourself in the foot by mistake.