Once upon a time David P James said...
> I use KMail to read this and other mailing lists. When replying to a
> message, KMail will look for the last instance of <new
> line><dash><dash><space><return> and remove that and everything below
> from the reply. A problem occurs however on mailing lists that use that
> format to delimit the unsubscribe info when the author has also used it
> since KMail will then only remove the unsubscribe info and not the
> author's sig.
>
> The solution seems simple enough - use a KMail filter to pipe messages
> through sed to remove the second signature delimiter if there is one.
> Here is the sed script I am using but it doesn't work as expected:
>
> sed s/'^\-\-\ '//2
>
> From my understanding of the man and info pages, this should look for
> the second instance of <dash><dash><space> and replace it with nothing.
No, the "2" flag will match the second regex on the _line_, not in the
file. This is not much use with the anchors (^ and $), since you cannot
have multiple matches on a line.
Try sed 's/-- //2' on stdin and type:
-- hello -- world -- x
and you'll get
-- hello world -- x
ie. it's removed the second "-- ".
I'm not sure you can do what you want with sed, since you need to
maintain some state, whereas sed seems to be stateless - each line is
processed independently of the other lines.
However, awk should do what you want:
awk 'BEGIN {sepcount=0} /^-- $/ {sepcount+=1; if (sepcount==2) next} {print}'
Alternatively, you can use awk to strip the sigs completely:
awk '/^-- $/ {nextfile} {print}'
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