How do you “debug” a regular expression with sed?

Question

I\'m trying to use a regexp using sed. I\'ve tested my regex with kiki, a gnome application to test regexpd, and it works in kiki.

date: 2010-10-29          


        

Answer 1

That looks more like a perl regex than it does a sed regex. Perhaps you would prefer using

perl -pi.orig -e 's/author:\s[0-9]{11};//g' file1 file2 file3

At least that way you could always add -Mre=debug to debug the regex.