6.7.5. Commands which operate differently
A. GNU sed version 3.02 and 3.02.80
The N command no longer discards the contents of the pattern space
upon reaching the end of file. This is not a bug, it's a feature.
However, it breaks certain scripts which relied on the older
behavior of N.
'N' adds the Next line to the pattern space, enabling multiple
lines to be stored and acted upon. Upon reaching the last line of
the file, if the N command was issued again, the contents of the
pattern space would be silently deleted and the script would abort
(this has been the traditional behavior). For this reason, sed
users generally wrote:
$!N; # to add the Next line to every line but the last one.
However, certain sed scripts relied on this behavior, such as the
script to delete trailing blank lines at the end of a file (see
script #12 in section 3.2, "Common one-line sed scripts", above).
Also, classic textbooks such as Dale Dougherty and Arnold Robbins'
sed & awk documented the older behavior.
The GNU sed maintainer felt that despite the portability problems
this would cause, changing the N command to print (rather than
delete) the pattern space was more consistent with one's intuitions
about how a command to "append the Next line" ought to behave.
Another fact favoring the change was that "{N;command;}" will
delete the last line if the file has an odd number of lines, but
print the last line if the file has an even number of lines.
To convert scripts which used the former behavior of N (deleting
the pattern space upon reaching the EOF) to scripts compatible with
all versions of sed, change a lone "N;" to "$d;N;".
