sed bug?

[Barrett, Michael [NCSUS]]

Hi --

I'm uncertain if this is a bug, but I've never seen this behavior on a UNIX system:

I cannot include whitespace as the regex in a substitute command. I want to take a fixed-location file of many records and change all multi-space substring to commas in order to change the file to a set of comma-separated values.

I attempt commands such as:
        sed s/  +/,/g < exp.dat

and receive error:
        sed: -e _expression_ #1, char 2: Unterminated `s' command

I cannot find any indication that whitespace is treated differently in the on-line man pages, and examples in the O'Reilly "Awk and Sed" book specifically use white space, yet fail to work with this tool.

Can you provide any feedback. Is this a known bug?

Thanks.