title: Is there another regular-expression "flavor" in GNU sed?
body: <p>I love <a href="http://sed.sourceforge.net/" rel="noreferrer"><code>sed</code></a> but I hate how many backslashes are needed in its regular expressions. For example, here is a <code>sed</code> command that will take the first 8 words out of each line of input:</p>
  
  <pre><code>sed -n 's/^\(\S\+\s\+\)\{8\}\(.*\)/\2/p'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>Ugly.</strong></p>
  
  <p>Almost every character has a backslash preceding it. It would be much nicer if <code>sed</code> would assume that special characters were special by default. </p>
  
  <p>Here is how I would like the expression to look:</p>
  
  <pre><code>s/^(\S+\s){8}(.*)/\2/p
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is there a way to achieve this?</p>