took me some hours (days) to realise it doh.
For those who use #dash and are faced with #bashisms:

bash: cat file | while read -d 'x' line ; do
dash: cat file | tr 'x' '\n' | while read line ; do

On the positive side, I can now drill down into horrible machine generated nested html like g-o-o-gle's translations of webpages - using dash. It all started with trying to parse RSS....
#gnu #linux #bash