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Full Discussion: Sed command garbled question
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Sed command garbled question Post 302659611 by bakunin on Thursday 21st of June 2012 08:23:47 AM
Old 06-21-2012
You know that some characters are special to seds command language, don't you? For instance:

Code:
x="abc" ; y="def"
sed "s/$x/$y/" /path/to/input > /path/to/output

will work as expected, but:

Code:
x="ab/c" ; y="def"
sed "s/$x/$y/" /path/to/input > /path/to/output

will not (and changing the delimiters will only move the problem around, because now some other character will cause the problem). The following even will work, but not in the expected way:

Code:
x="ab*c" ; y="def"
sed "s/$x/$y/" /path/to/input > /path/to/output


The only real solution to this is to escape the problematic characters and this is done by prepending them with backslashes:

Code:
x="ab/c" ; y="def"
x="$(sed 's/\/\\&/')"
sed "s/$x/$y/" /path/to/input > /path/to/output

Here is a quick (and unrefined!) solution which escapes the problematic characters. Use at your own risk:

Code:
sed 's/\[/\\&/g
     s/\]/\\&/g
     s/[/*?{}]/\\&/g'

I hope this helps.

bakunin
 

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TR(1)							      General Commands Manual							     TR(1)

NAME
tr - translate characters SYNOPSIS
tr [ -cds ] [ string1 [ string2 ] ] DESCRIPTION
Tr copies the standard input to the standard output with substitution or deletion of selected characters (runes). Input characters found in string1 are mapped into the corresponding characters of string2. When string2 is short it is padded to the length of string1 by dupli- cating its last character. Any combination of the options -cds may be used: -c Complement string1: replace it with a lexicographically ordered list of all other characters. -d Delete from input all characters in string1. -s Squeeze repeated output characters that occur in string2 to single characters. In either string a noninitial sequence -x, where x is any character (possibly quoted), stands for a range of characters: a possibly empty sequence of codes running from the successor of the previous code up through the code for x. The character followed by 1, 2 or 3 octal digits stands for the character whose 16-bit value is given by those digits. The character sequence followed by 1, 2, 3, or 4 hexadecimal digits stands for the character whose 16-bit value is given by those digits. A followed by any other character stands for that character. EXAMPLES
Replace all upper-case ASCII letters by lower-case. tr A-Z a-z <mixed >lower Create a list of all the words in one per line in where a word is taken to be a maximal string of alphabetics. String2 is given as a quoted newline. tr -cs A-Za-z ' ' <file1 >file2 SOURCE
/src/cmd/tr.c SEE ALSO
sed(1) TR(1)
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