Shell Programming and Scripting

the problem is while replacing the old string with new one with the help of SED i am unable to replace the special characters with new strings. how can i do that?
i dont want the user to be given the trouble to write '\' before every special characters like * , . , \ , $ , &.
sed s/'oldpattern_with_!@#'/new_pattern_with$#@!%/g filename is working.
trouble is with other characters as mentioned above.

can nobody give an answer?
plz
the question is suppose a file contains a word 'jkf$123'
i want to find from a directory the names of the files that contain this word and the want to replace this word with a new word 'JKF$$..123'
with grep -F option i can easily find the names of the files that contain this pattern but how to replace this pattern with the new pattern with the help of sed?
is it at all possible?

Please do not "bump" questions. If somebody can help they will. Pleading for a response will not result in a quick solution.

From the rules
Cheers
ZB

It's an interesting question. You can either escape special characters by prefixing with backslashes or you could write your own search/replace program that does not use regular expressions, e.g.using awk

Code:

BEGIN{
  a="jkf$123"
  b="JKF$$..123"
}
{
  while(i=index($0,a))
    $0=substr($0,1,i-1) b substr($0,i+length(a))
  print $0
}

it is not working.