Shell Programming and Scripting

An attempt to further explain the regular expression, with an ulterior motive of setting up for a question.

Given:

Code:

sed 's/^\([^:]*\):[^:]:/\1::/'

search for a pattern in the string matching:

Code:

^    = start of the line
\(   = Start of first remembered pattern
[^:] = followed by any character that is not a :
*    = followed by any number of the previous character class
       (characters that are not colons)
\)   = end of first remembered pattern
:    = followed by a colon
[^:] = followed by any character that is not a colon
:    = followed by a colon

<describes the first 2 fields, along with their seperators>

Replace with:

Code:

\1   = the first remembered pattern (the first field)
::   = followed by 2 literal colons

In other words, replace the first 2 colon separated fields
with the first field and 2 colons (deletes the 2nd field).

Question: if this sed command was in a script, could it be commented like I did above in the code? Can a sed regex be multi-line with comments?

One could also do:

Code:

s/:[^:]*:/::/