Sridhar Krishnamurthy

Thank you. it confirms my reasoning too. But the syntactical problem is aggravated if there are just two b elements. In this case the command line looks like xmlstarlet ed -P -S -d '/a/b[1]' -d '/a/b' test.xml | xmlstarlet format -s 4 - which is quite counter intuitive. I respect the designer's decision but would have preferred it otherwise as in the case where the command line is itself generated through scripts.

Thank you. i thought so. But the syntactical problem is aggravated if there are just two b elements. In this case the command line looks like xmlstarlet ed -P -S -d '/a/b[1]' -d '/a/b' test.xml | xmlstarlet format -s 4 - which is quite counter intuitive. I respect the designer's decision but would have preferred it otherwise as in the case where the command line is itself generated through scripts.

issue when ed -d (delete) is specified multiple times