5. About the (non-)limitations on line length

For those who want to write portable SED scripts, be aware that some implementations have been known to limit line lengths (for the pattern and hold spaces) to be no more than 4000 bytes. The POSIX.2 standard specifies that conforming SED implementations shall support at least 8192 byte line lengths. GNU SED has no built-in limit on line length; as long as SED can malloc() more (virtual) memory, it will allow lines as long as you care to feed it (or construct within it).

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