sed magic: a simple guide

The other day I had to create one of those "enum to string" functions. They really suck, always getting out of sync, so I made a script to auto-update the header file containing this function... just add a target to the makefile and you're done!

Anyway, this is the part of the script I came up with to get the enum elements:

cat enum_definition.h | sed -n '/enum OID/,/};/ s/(.*)/1/p'

Nice voodoo, isn't it? How the hell are you supposed to understand that? Well, you're not, sed is write-only-code, but you can try reading http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sed.html#toc-uh-25, a great sed introduction.

Have fun!