To whom it may concern, From man sed, I read: \cregexpc Match lines matching the regular expression regexp. The c may be any character. On the one hand - sed '\cncd' <<< n correctly shows empty output, since it's the same as sed '/n/d' <<< n based on the description above; - sed '\c\ccd' <<< c correctly shows an empty output too, but in this case the letter needed to be escaped for obvious reasons. On the other hand: - sed '\n\nnd' <<< n results in an output equal to the single character n, revealing that the backslash is having a double effect: 1. it prevents the following n from closing the opening \n. 2. it interprets the n as a newline instead of the literal letter n; this is confirmed by executing echo -e 'a\na' | sed -n 'N;\n\nnp'. The is means that using n in \nregexpn prevevents the use of the literal n in the regexp. The issue has come to light in this StackOverflow question. Kind regards, Enrico Maria De Angelis