Spurious non-convergent replace warning

[Chip Seraphine]

The following editfiles line:

                ReplaceAll "$(tab)+" With "$(spc)"

...invariably produces this:


	cfengine:cuffs: WARNING: Non-convergent edit operation ReplaceAll [ ] 
With [	]
        cfengine:cuffs: Line begins [127.0.0.1  localhost       ]
	cfengine:cuffs: Replacement matches search string and will thus replace 
every time - edit was not done
        cfengine:cuffs: Error editing file /var/tmp/hosts


Obviously, replacing one or more tabs with a single space is not really 
non-convergent.  The code in question (from item-ext.c, v 2.0.6, ~line 1350)

   if (regexec(&rx,VBUFF,1,&matchcheck,0) == 0)
      {
      snprintf(OUTPUT,bufsize*2,"WARNING: Non-convergent edit operation 
ReplaceAll [%s] With [%s]",replace,search);
      CfLog(cferror,OUTPUT,"");
      snprintf(OUTPUT,bufsize*2,"Line begins [%.40s]",ip->name);
      CfLog(cferror,OUTPUT,"");
      CfLog(cferror,"Replacement matches search string and will thus 
replace every time - edit was not done","");
      return false;
      }

...seems reasonable to the (near-)layman, but I get the same behavior on 
both Linux and Sun so I doubt it is a regexec bug.

How have others been handling this?

On a semi-aside, the reason this is coming up is because I am trying to 
ensure that a set of hosts exists in my /etc/hosts.  It seems the most 
efficient way to do this is to loop thru the file and use 
ReplaceLinesMatchingField; however, since only a single char can be used 
in SplitOn, I have to normalize the delimiters first as done above. 
Anybody know of a patch or plans to allow for a regex or at least 
multiple characters to be used as SplitOn delimiters?