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sed
Raised as a usability problem by 14 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2013–2025), in 12 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Regex support is poor and flags differ between BSD and GNUUnreviewed
20132026- Sed regex support is poor and flags behave differently across BSD and GNU2025-09-18
- Default POSIX regex mode is hard to use, needing -E flag discovered late2024-04-28
- Sed's regular expression flavour is poor, so the commenter rarely uses it2017-10-25
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 13 complaints
- Sed regex support is poor and flags behave differently across BSD and GNU2025-09-18
- Sed commands have always been painful and confusing to use and understand2024-09-05
- Default POSIX regex mode is hard to use, needing -E flag discovered late2024-04-28
- Joining CSV files in sed requires positional variables and tricky shell escaping2023-07-09
- Stream editor's model is very hard to understand, forcing manual lookups2022-11-07
- Shell pipelines like sed and xargs are arcane and hard to make work2022-11-07
- Hard to remember syntax, so must relearn it each time2021-11-12
- Author finds the sed hold space confusing to use and understand2021-11-12
- Sed's regular expression flavour is poor, so the commenter rarely uses it2017-10-25
- Forces users to consult manpages or trial and error each time2016-07-20
- Man pages are obtuse and lack basic examples, so simple commands are hard to find2015-05-21
- Sed's syntax is painful and harder to use than awk2015-01-15
- Hard to learn: confusing flags, differing versions, and easy to overwrite files by mistake2013-01-24