Programming patterns in sed

Do you grok sed, or is it all just line noise to you? Do you marvel at hackers who craft out nifty sed one liners only to realise that there's no way anyone could understand and reuse them?

On the other hand, perhaps you're the kind of person who loves tools like sed and awk, but have never been able to convince others of their power. In either case, this talk is for you.

sed may not be a fully featured programming language like, say C, Java or PHP, but you can do a lot with it, and you can write clean, structured sed programs. What? Did I just say sed and structured in the same sentence?

This talk will cover the basic programming patterns of sequence, selection and iteration, and also touch on variable manipulation, file handling and debugging - all in sed.

At the end of this talk, you'll either have a new found interest in sed, or you'll think that I'm a nutcase... but that's why it's in the Hacks track.