Some wishes for upcoming versions of SED:
\l, \L Lower-case next char, lower-case rest of pattern \u, \U Upper-case next char, upper-case rest of pattern \E End case conversion invoked by previous "\[lLuU]"
-E, --extended-regex No more need to backquote (...groups...) or x{interval,expressions}. Also: +, ?, and | work without backslashes, just like Perl.
*? 0 or more, but as few as possible +? 1 or more, but as few as possible ?? 0 or 1, but 0 if possible {m,n}? between m and n, but as few as possible Example: $ echo banana | sed "s/b.*an/TOAST/" TOASTa $ echo banana | perl -pe "s/b.*?an/TOAST/" TOASTana