On Wed, 22 Oct 1997 you (Philip Guenther) wrote:
There is only one GNU sed 2.05. You have the Redhat RPM sed-2.05-6,
which besides containing GNU sed 2.05, includes a manpage that is
incorrect. The documentation is in error, not the program.
My dupe filter was switched off when I got this, and I replied to Philip
without replying to the group.
Just to lay this to rest:
I was wrong to say there were "several versions" of sed 2.05. I should
have said "several distributions".
At least one of these distributions tries to make up for the lack of a
man page (I never did understand GNUs aversion to man pages) by including
a man page provided by Eric S. Raymond <esr(_at_)snark(_dot_)thyrsus(_dot_)com>.
This man page attributes to the GNU binary a -g option that certainly
appears in earlier seds but which seems to have been dropped without
comment by GNU.
I would suggest that you a) report this as a bug to RedHat; and b) edit
or remove the manpage.
Done and done.
el bid