Delete the hold space in sed?

[David J. Camp]

I am trying to write a sed program, and I cannot figure out how to 
delete the hold space.  I tried:

    /$PATTERN/{s/.*\n//;h;}

but this fails in some cases, in particular when the search pattern
is:
    /.*/

In that case, the /.*\n/ pattern fails, and the pattern space is
copied to the hold space.  It works when the search pattern is
a simple upper case alphabetic string.

Can anyone suggest a good way to do this?  Thank you,  -David-

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