Sed Tricks


 
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# 1  
Old 10-20-2009
Sed Tricks

I have a file which containd a string "old" and I need to replace all old with "new" if and only if it is a string not part of a string like Gold or fold etc.

I tried with sed like below

Code:
echo "old gold old" | sed 's/old/new/g'

It doesn't give the desired output, It give "old Gnew new".
Can any one help me out?

Thanks,
Siba S Nayak
# 2  
Old 10-20-2009
Code:
echo "old gold old" | sed 's/\<old\>/new/g'
new gold new

Inside < and > you can define a "word" in RegExp. Have to escape them with \ though.
# 3  
Old 10-20-2009
you have to play with word boundary. check your sed man/info page for more info. alternatively, the logic to do this is to iterate each old, check for "old" and when found, change it to "new".. so in bash, you can do something like this, assuming your words are in a file
Code:
#!/bin/bash
declare -a arr
while read -a arr 
do
    for ((i=0;i<=${#arr};i++))
    do
       case "${arr[i]}" in
            old) arr[i]="new"
       esac
    done
    echo "${arr[@]}"
done < file

output
Code:
$ more file
old gold fold old
$ ./shell.sh
new gold fold new

# 4  
Old 10-20-2009
Thanks a lot Zaxxon and Ghostdog for your quick response.
 
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