Re: config.status - robust sed substitutions

[Paul Eggert]

Robert Anderson <address@hidden> writes:

> However, note that _any_ new choice of delimiter will not only fail for
> the case of the chosen character, but will also fail for the characters
> '&' and '\' which are always metacharacters on the RHS of a sed
> expression.

'\' we can't do much about here, though we can print an error message
and exit.  It's pretty rare to find it in file names, outside of
DOS-based systems, and those guys can always use '/' as it's
equivalent.  And anyway '\' will break half the code in autoconf
regardless, as it uses 'echo', so I'm not too worried about
disallowing '\' in file names.

'&' we can defang by using '&' as the delimiter.  '&', like '|',
rarely occurs in file names because it also is a shell metacharacter.
So, how about if we use '&'?