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I just integrated a new sed(1) port for illumos. This is derived from FreeBSD, but it includes a fix for a race condition, and support for translated messages. (FreeBSD friends, please feel free to include these changes back -- I've not changed the original BSD license.)

The legacy sed is gone.

This new sed should work on all the old sed scripts, but there were a few tricky parts that changed -- if you relied on parsing the output of the "l" command, or on the fact that legacy sed only treated content as a byte stream rather than multibyte characters, you might be affected.

Also, I've run into at least one sed script which was malformed, but mistakenly accepted by old sed, but which the new version doesn't accept (but instead gives you a meaningful error message.)

The biggest features in the new sed code:

support for -i and -Isupport for -E to enable EREsmuch more helpful error messages ("command garbled" was just not very specific)
Enjoy, and please report any problems in the illumos bug tracking system at http://illumos.org/. Thanks!

Update: Note that sed -i requires an argument (the extension) unlike GNU sed where the argument is optional. We can fix that, although this would make us less compatible with FreeBSD sed. (Specifically, it would make it nigh impossible to specify an "extension" starting with a dash.) If someone cares passionately about this, they should file a bug and bring it up on the developer list -- I am happy either way.