Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I wanted to perform a substitution using 'sed' in my script. I issue the below command

sed -i 's/DATE_TIME = .*/DATE_TIME ='`date`'/' file1.txt

but it fails with the below error:
sed: -e expression #1, char 43: unterminated `s' command

using a debug option in my script i got this

+ sed -i 's/DATE_TIME = .*/DATE_TIME = Mon' Sep 20 08:16:36 IST '2010/ file1.txt

the single quote(') after "Mon" and before "2010" above is creating an issue here.

Can anybody help me out?

Thanks,
Neil

Don't forget to use code tags

change ' to "

Code:

sed -i "s/DATE_TIME = .*/DATE_TIME =`date`/" file1.txt

There's a bit more than just changing each single quote to double quotes. You'll need to drop the double quotes in the middle:

Code:

sed -i "s/DATE_TIME = .*/DATE_TIME =`date`/" file1.txt

What was happening was the tokens generated by the date command were treated as multiple tokens on the sed command; everything up through the day of week token was interpreted as the 'programme' (it was the first token on the command line), and the rest were going to be interpreted as file names. By supplying the whole sed programme in double quotes, you allow the command in back quotes to be evaluated and the result substituted, while including them as a part of the quoted string.

As a side note, I believe that $(command) is now preferred to using backquotes.

or you could also try this

Code:

sed -i 's/DATE_TIME = .*/DATE_TIME ='"`date`"'/' file1.txt

Hummm, I swore that rdcwayx's post didn't include an example... Oh well, sorry for the duplicate information.

Thanks guys.. it works exactly the way i want .

Thanks a ton