This morning I was editing a Unix text file that was the output from a diff of two versions of a station location file. I use the output to annotate the changes in another file. I do a series of find/replaces to clear the document of the lines that contain block addresses and the block separators so that I end up with only the changed, deleted and added lines. I do not remove the line endings as I use the resulting blank lines to visually separate blocks. I do this job 2 to 3 times a month.

This was my first time running the job since upgrading from v17.30 to v21.10.0.1029 and there were issues. First, the global find/replace to get rid of the block separators worked but the line change markers were all offset by one line upwards after the first one for each line changed. So if I changed lines 1, 4, 7, and 11 for example, the line change markers would be on lines 1, 3, 5, and 8 (right, off by 1, off by 2, off by 3).

When I ran the find/replace for the block addresses I decided to use the find in column option and when I did a replace all, it found nothing. But if I did a replace without the replace all, still with the find in column option, it would find an address and replace it. I don't use the find in column option much since I usually just write a regular expression so I don't know if this behavior is new or old or even incorrect.