UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

It appears to be the '.' that is giving me problems.

File Contents:
SCCS=33.0

The awk command:
prev=`awk -F"=" '{ print $2 }' $FILE`
returns: 33.0

when I tried to pass this to sed it garbles the command even though I am enclosing in quotes:
sed "s/$prev/$new/g" $FILE

to prove this i did:
prev=33; new=44
sed "s/$prev/$new/g" $FILE
which worked.

So is there a way to get sed to treat the '.' as literal in the variable? The number following the '.' may not always be '0'. Any more thoughts? Thank you very much.

you have to 'escape' it:
echo 'SCCS=33.4' | sed 's/\./\\\&/g'

On the second thought, why don't you do everything in AWK? You already are using it, so..

Code:

nawk -F= -v mult=10 '{ $2 = sprintf("%.1f", $2 * mult); print }' $FILE

Well, I've tried all day and this is what I finally came up with:

prev=`expr "$(sed -n '/ET_SCCSREL=/p' $FILE)" : '.*\(....\)'`
new=$(echo "scale=1; $prev + 1.0" | bc )
nawk -v prev=$prev -v new=$new '{ gsub(prev,new); print }' $FILE > $FILE2

This seems to work. Thanks for all your help. If you know a different way please feel free to let me know. I know there has to be an easier way.

Thanks.