This question already has answers here:
Using different delimiters in sed commands and range addresses
(3 answers)
Closed 6 years ago.
I am having trouble figuring out how to use sed to search and replace strings containing the / character in a text file /etc/myconfig.
For instance, in my existing text file, I have:
myparam /path/to/a argB=/path/to/B xo
and I want this replaced by:
myparam /path/to/c argB=/path/to/D xo
I attempted doing this in bash:
line='myparam /path/to/a argB=/path/to/B xo'
line_new='myparam /path/to/c argB=/path/to/D xo'
sed -i 's/$line/$line_new/g' /etc/myconfig
But nothing happens.
Attempting
grep -rn "$line" /etc/myconfig
does return me 'myparam /path/to/a argB=/path/to/B xo' though.
What's the correct way to express my sed command to execute this search and replace and correctly deal with the / command? (I reckon that the / character in my strings are the ones giving me the problem because I used a similar sed command to search and replace another line in the text file with no problems and that line does not have a / character.
Don't escape the backslashes; you'll confuse yourself. Use a different symbol after the s command that doesn't appear in the text (I'm using % in the example below):
line_old='myparam /path/to/a argB=/path/to/B xo'
line_new='myparam /path/to/c argB=/path/to/D xo'
sed -i "s%$line_old%$line_new%g" /etc/myconfig
Also, enclose the whole string in double quotes; using single quotes means that sed sees $line (in the original) instead of the expanded value. Inside single quotes, there is no expansion and there are no metacharacters. If your text can contain almost any plain text character, use a control character (e.g. control-A or control-G) as the delimiter.
Note that the use of -i here mirrors what is in the question, but that assumes the use of GNU sed. BSD sed (found on Mac OS X too) requires a suffix. You can use sed -i '' … to replace in situ; that does not work with GNU sed. To be portable between the two, use -i.bak; that will work with both — but gives you a backup file that you'll probably want to delete. Other Unix platforms (e.g. AIX, HP-UX, Solaris) may have variants of sed that do not support -i at all. It is not required by the POSIX specification for sed.
This might work for you:
sed -i "s|$line|$line_new|g" /etc/myconfig
You must use "'s so that the $line and $new_line are interpolated. Also use | or any character not found in the match or replacement strings as a delimiter.
Related
This question already has answers here:
Using different delimiters in sed commands and range addresses
(3 answers)
Closed 1 year ago.
I have a Visual Studio project, which is developed locally. Code files have to be deployed to a remote server. The only problem is the URLs they contain, which are hard-coded.
The project contains URLs such as ?page=one. For the link to be valid on the server, it must be /page/one .
I've decided to replace all URLs in my code files with sed before deployment, but I'm stuck on slashes.
I know this is not a pretty solution, but it's simple and would save me a lot of time. The total number of strings I have to replace is fewer than 10. A total number of files which have to be checked is ~30.
An example describing my situation is below:
The command I'm using:
sed -f replace.txt < a.txt > b.txt
replace.txt which contains all the strings:
s/?page=one&/pageone/g
s/?page=two&/pagetwo/g
s/?page=three&/pagethree/g
a.txt:
?page=one&
?page=two&
?page=three&
Content of b.txt after I run my sed command:
pageone
pagetwo
pagethree
What I want b.txt to contain:
/page/one
/page/two
/page/three
The easiest way would be to use a different delimiter in your search/replace lines, e.g.:
s:?page=one&:pageone:g
You can use any character as a delimiter that's not part of either string. Or, you could escape it with a backslash:
s/\//foo/
Which would replace / with foo. You'd want to use the escaped backslash in cases where you don't know what characters might occur in the replacement strings (if they are shell variables, for example).
The s command can use any character as a delimiter; whatever character comes after the s is used. I was brought up to use a #. Like so:
s#?page=one&#/page/one#g
A very useful but lesser-known fact about sed is that the familiar s/foo/bar/ command can use any punctuation, not only slashes. A common alternative is s#foo#bar#, from which it becomes obvious how to solve your problem.
add \ before special characters:
s/\?page=one&/page\/one\//g
etc.
In a system I am developing, the string to be replaced by sed is input text from a user which is stored in a variable and passed to sed.
As noted earlier on this post, if the string contained within the sed command block contains the actual delimiter used by sed - then sed terminates on syntax error. Consider the following example:
This works:
$ VALUE=12345
$ echo "MyVar=%DEF_VALUE%" | sed -e s/%DEF_VALUE%/${VALUE}/g
MyVar=12345
This breaks:
$ VALUE=12345/6
$ echo "MyVar=%DEF_VALUE%" | sed -e s/%DEF_VALUE%/${VALUE}/g
sed: -e expression #1, char 21: unknown option to `s'
Replacing the default delimiter is not a robust solution in my case as I did not want to limit the user from entering specific characters used by sed as the delimiter (e.g. "/").
However, escaping any occurrences of the delimiter in the input string would solve the problem.
Consider the below solution of systematically escaping the delimiter character in the input string before having it parsed by sed.
Such escaping can be implemented as a replacement using sed itself, this replacement is safe even if the input string contains the delimiter - this is since the input string is not part of the sed command block:
$ VALUE=$(echo ${VALUE} | sed -e "s#/#\\\/#g")
$ echo "MyVar=%DEF_VALUE%" | sed -e s/%DEF_VALUE%/${VALUE}/g
MyVar=12345/6
I have converted this to a function to be used by various scripts:
escapeForwardSlashes() {
# Validate parameters
if [ -z "$1" ]
then
echo -e "Error - no parameter specified!"
return 1
fi
# Perform replacement
echo ${1} | sed -e "s#/#\\\/#g"
return 0
}
this line should work for your 3 examples:
sed -r 's#\?(page)=([^&]*)&#/\1/\2#g' a.txt
I used -r to save some escaping .
the line should be generic for your one, two three case. you don't have to do the sub 3 times
test with your example (a.txt):
kent$ echo "?page=one&
?page=two&
?page=three&"|sed -r 's#\?(page)=([^&]*)&#/\1/\2#g'
/page/one
/page/two
/page/three
replace.txt should be
s/?page=/\/page\//g
s/&//g
please see this article
http://netjunky.net/sed-replace-path-with-slash-separators/
Just using | instead of /
Great answer from Anonymous. \ solved my problem when I tried to escape quotes in HTML strings.
So if you use sed to return some HTML templates (on a server), use double backslash instead of single:
var htmlTemplate = "<div style=\\"color:green;\\"></div>";
A simplier alternative is using AWK as on this answer:
awk '$0="prefix"$0' file > new_file
You may use an alternative regex delimiter as a search pattern by backs lashing it:
sed '\,{some_path},d'
For the s command:
sed 's,{some_path},{other_path},'
I am trying to remove ./ between two characters using sed but not getting the desired output.
Sample:
e2b66a3d84ee448c33d7f2a2f7e51c58 ./2017_06_10_0400.txt
I tried the below but it is not working as expected, even the . in the ".txt" is getting removed.
sed -i 's/[./,]//g'
Beware: don't even think of using the -i option until you know the code is working. You can screw things up big time!
Use:
sed -e 's%[.]/%%g'
You can choose the delimiter in a s/// command, and when the regular expressions involve /, it is sensible to choose something else — I often use % when it doesn't figure in the text. The -e is optional. Using [.] to detect an actual dot is one way; you can write \. if you prefer, but I'm allergic to avoidable backslashes (if you've never had to write 16 backslashes in a row to get troff to do what you want, you haven't suffered enough).
Be aware that the -i option behaves differently in GNU sed and BSD (macOS) sed. Using -i.bak works in both (for an arbitrary, non-empty string such as .bak). Otherwise, your code isn't portable (which may or may not matter to you now, but might well do later on).
You have:
sed -i 's/[./,]//g'
The trouble with this is that it looks for any of the characters ., / or , in isolation — so it removes the . in .txt as well as the . and / in ./. You need to look for consecutive characters — as in my suggested solution.
try this:
echo "e2b66a3d84ee448c33d7f2a2f7e51c58 ./2017_06_10_0400.txt" | sed -e 's|\./||'
You need to use escape character \
's#\.\/##g'
:=>echo "e2b66a3d84ee448c33d7f2a2f7e51c58 ./2017_06_10_0400.txt" | sed 's#\.\/##g'
e2b66a3d84ee448c33d7f2a2f7e51c58 2017_06_10_0400.txt
:=>
This question already has answers here:
How to use variables in a command in sed?
(4 answers)
Closed 4 years ago.
I have a file that contains names of directories and some other information, but the names always come first.The file looks like this:
/home/user/Desktop/IS/proj_1/sch/text 4 2018-03-14 07:41:01
/home/user/Desktop/IS/file1.txt 3 2018-03-14 16:50:01
...
I have a variable "name" that contains this for example:
/home/user/Desktop/IS/file1.txt
And I need to delete that one particular line from the file somehow. I've searched many posts and tried using various quotations and ways of expansions, but nothing did the trick. If I type it in directly, it deletes the line without problem, but I'm having a hard time doing it from a variable. This is what I came up with but it still doesn't work.
sed -i '/"$name"/d' $File_name
Try this :
sed -i "\|$name|d" "$File_name"
As you can see, I changed the delimiter for |, you can pick another one depending of your needs from most of ascii characters (not all works)
sed command doesn't allow plain string based search and performs search using only a regex (BRE or ERE). That requires escaping all special regex meta-characters in search pattern.
Better to use a non-regex approach using awk:
name='/home/user/Desktop/IS/file1.txt'
awk -v p="$name" '!index($0, p)' file
/home/user/Desktop/IS/proj_1/sch/text 4 2018-03-14 07:41:01
Whatever given in single quotes wont get expanded.
Try:
sed -i "/$name/d" $File_name
If you have problems with /, escape them properly.
name=$(echo "$name"|sed -e "s/\//\\\\\//g")
sed -i "/$name/d" $File_name
This question already has answers here:
Search and replace with sed when dots and underscores are present
(5 answers)
Closed 6 years ago.
I am trying to replace (for instance) 6.0 by 6.1 in a file, without 640 being replaced by 6.1
I have currently:
sed -i "s/$previousName/$newName/" 'myFile'
I think that the solution could be in here, but I don't find the right solution.
EDIT both string are inside a variable and the question this is supposed to be a duplicate of doesn't treat this case
Using an inner sed:
sed -i "s#$(echo $previousName | sed 's/\./\\./g')#$newName#g" myFile
Try this:
sed -i "s/6\.0/6.1/" 'myFile'
The key is to escape the . character in the pattern which has special meaning. By default it matches any character (including 0 in 640), whereas with a \ in front of it, it only matches a literal ..
Since you have the pattern in a variable, you could escape the . in it first like this:
previousNameE="$(sed -e 's/\./\\./' <<< "$previousName")"
sed -i "s/$previousNameE/$newName/" 'myFile'
if perl is acceptable:
perl -i -pe "s/\Q$previousName/$newName/" 'myFile'
From perldoc for \Q
Returns the value of EXPR with all the ASCII non-"word" characters
backslashed. (That is, all ASCII characters not matching
/[A-Za-z_0-9]/ will be preceded by a backslash in the returned string,
regardless of any locale settings.) This is the internal function
implementing the \Q escape in double-quoted strings
Another example:
$ echo '*.^[}' | perl -pe 's/\Q*.^[}/q($abc$)/e'
$abc$
Further reading: Perl flags -pe, -pi, -p, -w, -d, -i, -t?
For some reason I can't seem to find a straightforward answer to this and I'm on a bit of a time crunch at the moment. How would I go about inserting a choice line of text after the first line matching a specific string using the sed command. I have ...
CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"
CLIENTFILE="bar"
And I want insert a line after the CLIENTSCRIPT= line resulting in ...
CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"
CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"
CLIENTFILE="bar"
Try doing this using GNU sed:
sed '/CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"/a CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"' file
if you want to substitute in-place, use
sed -i '/CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"/a CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"' file
Output
CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"
CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"
CLIENTFILE="bar"
Doc
see sed doc and search \a (append)
Note the standard sed syntax (as in POSIX, so supported by all conforming sed implementations around (GNU, OS/X, BSD, Solaris...)):
sed '/CLIENTSCRIPT=/a\
CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"' file
Or on one line:
sed -e '/CLIENTSCRIPT=/a\' -e 'CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"' file
(-expressions (and the contents of -files) are joined with newlines to make up the sed script sed interprets).
The -i option for in-place editing is also a GNU extension, some other implementations (like FreeBSD's) support -i '' for that.
Alternatively, for portability, you can use perl instead:
perl -pi -e '$_ .= qq(CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"\n) if /CLIENTSCRIPT=/' file
Or you could use ed or ex:
printf '%s\n' /CLIENTSCRIPT=/a 'CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"' . w q | ex -s file
Sed command that works on MacOS (at least, OS 10) and Unix alike (ie. doesn't require gnu sed like Gilles' (currently accepted) one does):
sed -e '/CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"/a\'$'\n''CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"' file
This works in bash and maybe other shells too that know the $'\n' evaluation quote style. Everything can be on one line and work in
older/POSIX sed commands. If there might be multiple lines matching the CLIENTSCRIPT="foo" (or your equivalent) and you wish to only add the extra line the first time, you can rework it as follows:
sed -e '/^ *CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"/b ins' -e b -e ':ins' -e 'a\'$'\n''CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"' -e ': done' -e 'n;b done' file
(this creates a loop after the line insertion code that just cycles through the rest of the file, never getting back to the first sed command again).
You might notice I added a '^ *' to the matching pattern in case that line shows up in a comment, say, or is indented. Its not 100% perfect but covers some other situations likely to be common. Adjust as required...
These two solutions also get round the problem (for the generic solution to adding a line) that if your new inserted line contains unescaped backslashes or ampersands they will be interpreted by sed and likely not come out the same, just like the \n is - eg. \0 would be the first line matched. Especially handy if you're adding a line that comes from a variable where you'd otherwise have to escape everything first using ${var//} before, or another sed statement etc.
This solution is a little less messy in scripts (that quoting and \n is not easy to read though), when you don't want to put the replacement text for the a command at the start of a line if say, in a function with indented lines. I've taken advantage that $'\n' is evaluated to a newline by the shell, its not in regular '\n' single-quoted values.
Its getting long enough though that I think perl/even awk might win due to being more readable.
A POSIX compliant one using the s command:
sed '/CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"/s/.*/&\
CLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"/' file
Maybe a bit late to post an answer for this, but I found some of the above solutions a bit cumbersome.
I tried simple string replacement in sed and it worked:
sed 's/CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"/&\nCLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"/' file
& sign reflects the matched string, and then you add \n and the new line.
As mentioned, if you want to do it in-place:
sed -i 's/CLIENTSCRIPT="foo"/&\nCLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"/' file
Another thing. You can match using an expression:
sed -i 's/CLIENTSCRIPT=.*/&\nCLIENTSCRIPT2="hello"/' file
Hope this helps someone
The awk variant :
awk '1;/CLIENTSCRIPT=/{print "CLIENTSCRIPT2=\"hello\""}' file
I had a similar task, and was not able to get the above perl solution to work.
Here is my solution:
perl -i -pe "BEGIN{undef $/;} s/^\[mysqld\]$/[mysqld]\n\ncollation-server = utf8_unicode_ci\n/sgm" /etc/mysql/my.cnf
Explanation:
Uses a regular expression to search for a line in my /etc/mysql/my.cnf file that contained only [mysqld] and replaced it with
[mysqld]
collation-server = utf8_unicode_ci
effectively adding the collation-server = utf8_unicode_ci line after the line containing [mysqld].
I had to do this recently as well for both Mac and Linux OS's and after browsing through many posts and trying many things out, in my particular opinion I never got to where I wanted to which is: a simple enough to understand solution using well known and standard commands with simple patterns, one liner, portable, expandable to add in more constraints. Then I tried to looked at it with a different perspective, that's when I realized i could do without the "one liner" option if a "2-liner" met the rest of my criteria. At the end I came up with this solution I like that works in both Ubuntu and Mac which i wanted to share with everyone:
insertLine=$(( $(grep -n "foo" sample.txt | cut -f1 -d: | head -1) + 1 ))
sed -i -e "$insertLine"' i\'$'\n''bar'$'\n' sample.txt
In first command, grep looks for line numbers containing "foo", cut/head selects 1st occurrence, and the arithmetic op increments that first occurrence line number by 1 since I want to insert after the occurrence.
In second command, it's an in-place file edit, "i" for inserting: an ansi-c quoting new line, "bar", then another new line. The result is adding a new line containing "bar" after the "foo" line. Each of these 2 commands can be expanded to more complex operations and matching.