Shell Programming and Scripting

I am trying to use the sed command to remove any character that is passed as a parameter to the script. I may want to replace any character in the file (-, =, $, space). I'm running into an issue when passing the $.

This is a typical row in the file.

Code:

"000000B553","--INTERNAL USE ONLY-PCG--",="07041200033", $26.70,$18.23,$8.47,04/12/2007,="00015251",198181

Code (test_script.sh):

Code:

#!/bin/ksh

REMOVE_CHAR=${1}   
sed "s/""${REMOVE_CHAR}""//g" orig.csv > corrected.csv
exit 0

If I run the following, the $ is not removed.

test_script.sh "$"

Can someone please help?

Thank you.

Try

Code:

sed "s/\\${REMOVE_CHAR}//g"

and, btw, why don't you use $1 in lieu of $REMOVE_CHAR?

That worked. Thank you so much!

Also, I could use $1 for this, but this is just a piece of a larger script where there are 6 different parameters that are named for clarity. I just didn't change that part.

For removing characters

Code:

tr -d '$'  < orig.csv > corrected.csv

is more straightforward.

Probably readability, even without comments you know what the sed statement is doing due to the variable name.

Edit: Hipe has the way you probably should do this.

It's because $ is a special character in sed and you aren't escaping it. You either need to have an if statement that checks what the character is, or you need to escape it when it's being passed to the shell, IE

Code:

$ ./test.sh \\$   
$ cat corrected.csv
"000000B553","--INTERNAL USE ONLY-PCG--",="07041200033", 26.70,18.23,8.47,04/12/2007,="00015251",198181

You can't just use one escape character, as it'll eat it before it gets to your sed statement. The other route again is simply an if statement. I know ksh will handle regex matching, but I don't know the format offhand, but your regex would simply be something like [.*$^], which are some of the characters sed will gobble up.

You're right, @hipe. But the OP used the terms remove and replace in his original request.

The sed suggestion with the escape before the variable expansion would work for special characters that need to be escaped so that they lose their special meaning, however there are also characters that gain a special meaning when escaped and then it would fail. For example: (){}123456789( and it would also fail for the empty string)..