Shell Programming and Scripting

I am making a script to relocate a project file. I have all of the variables in place and everything is working except:

the first variable changes everytime it passes thru a loop. The second is a constant value.


when I run that it does what I want...but incorrectly. It is finding results that contain the current string....but sometimes the result is incorrect.

If the current string is

this/is/a/directory/here

and I need it to be

that/isnt/the/path/here

and it comes across

this/is/a/directory/and/more

it will change

this/is/a/directory/and/more

to

that/isnt/the/path/and/more

I don't want that. I only want it to change it if it matches 100%

I have tried:

it doesn't change anything

and
with the same result.

I can not find a single function that will work!

my variables are all written out as

\/this\/is\/a\/directory btw, so that isn't the problem.

If anyone knows another solution to this I would REALLY appreciate it! I am not stuck on sed. It's just the only way I know to do this.

---------- Post updated at 07:35 PM ---------- Previous update was at 06:53 PM ----------

I seem to be having the same issues with perl

---------- Post updated at 07:37 PM ---------- Previous update was at 07:35 PM ----------

perl seems to be a lot faster tho

Can you show more of your input? If you want to match more specifically you have to be more specific about the context.

I'm surprised sed is working at all for you and not throwing nonstop syntax errors. You are doing sed "s/$PATH1/$PATH2/" which amounts to sed "s/a/b/c//d/e/f/g/h/" Look a all those slashes! sed will think the expression ends at s/a/b/. Not sure what it's doing with the rest.

You can use something else as the separator instead which will make it much easier to work with sed. sed "s#${PATH1}#${PATH2}" for instance,

Running sed 9,000 times on the same file is incredibly wasteful. There's got to be a faster way.

Please show your input file and the output you'd want from it...

$NFP is something like this

and changes with each directory

and $NFPN is a constant

but it is important that the exact match is used or it changes things ahead of time.

I've tried using

but it is still getting the same result

I've done this exact operation comparing two arrays in the same file and it works perfectly....but for some reason this is giving me trouble....should the same syntax!!

---------- Post updated at 08:29 PM ---------- Previous update was at 08:15 PM ----------

as I said, I am open to suggestion...if someone knows a better way I am all for it!

---------- Post updated at 09:23 PM ---------- Previous update was at 08:29 PM ----------

ok so heres an idea...is there a way to use a variable as a line number for sed?

example:

that would basically solve my problem

---------- Post updated at 09:32 PM ---------- Previous update was at 09:23 PM ----------

GOT IT!!!!

I extracted the line numbers I needed to replace and used it as the line to replace...so it only does the operation one line at a time!

---------- Post updated 09-28-12 at 10:04 AM ---------- Previous update was 09-27-12 at 09:32 PM ----------

btw, as I said earlier, the variable is not

resulting in

it is

resulting in

which is correct.

The issue was partial matches. But calling out the line number to be addressed only works exactly as I want it to!