Hi

I use sed to patch my pacman.conf file to add the multilib but for the last about 2 or 3 months it won't work.
The only thing I can think of is that the ISO that came those months had something changed.

Is use this:
In vim I checked that the line ends right after the ']' on the [multilib] line with 'set list'

What is going on here, have they changed the way sed works 'cos what ever I do I can't get it to work.

//B52

In every case of that sort of thing that I fixed, I traced the cause to operator (=my) error.

Sed is line-oriented. It deals with single lines. That has never changed, and attempts to hack around it can be brittle, as you've discovered.

What will have changed is your input /etc/pacman.conf file - it'll now have an odd number of lines before the multilib one, and thus the N hack fails (because that relies on the correct lines being paired up).


So, instead of using Sed, why not solve this with an actual patch?

First copy the file to (e.g.) /etc/pacman.conf.custom and modify as desired, then use diff -u to create the patch:
Then to apply it:
That process is scalable if there are other changes you might want to make, without needing to worry about multi-line handling or escaping certain characters.

(One can also use "git diff" and "git apply", without needing a Git repository; or indeed one can version /etc using Git if desired.)

Seems it was, but not the first about 13 months

Totally correct. Wonder how I could have missed that or totally forgot when reading man page of this.
Yeah, I'll use the patch thing. I don't think this file will change that often anyways.
Thx man

crudini is also an option.

How can that change the default pacman.conf?

I use crudini (with my changes) for my install script and I like it.
Simple to use for all the parameters that I have, just . it and they are usable in my script.