I have scripts containing the following line:
echo + /etc>>$BUFFER
I would like to edit them with sed and insert another line right after this:
echo + /etc>>$BUFFER
echo - /etc/cache>>$BUFFER
and leave the rest of the file as it was. What is the SED regexp to do this ?
sed -i '$a echo - /etc/cache>>$BUFFER' myfile.txt
The $ says the last line and a is append the -i option writes the file in place.
If you want the match anywhere you can address it with a regex / / like this just make sure to escape the / like / since sed expects the regex to be encapsulated in / /
sed -i '/echo + \/etc>>$BUFFER/a echo - /etc/cache>>$BUFFER' myfile.txt
Since the (copy & paste) of the above statement omits a space prior to the first + sign (likely due to a BUG in the software that runs the posts to this website) - here is version that should work when copied ):
sed -i '/echo \ + \/etc>>$BUFFER/a echo - /etc/cache>>$BUFFER' myfile.txt
or if you want to avoid escaping the single front slash in the future (not really useful in this case since its only one but if you had a lot of front slashes - again weird escaped space is only due to a BUG in the software of this website (or my browser firefox) if you type it on the command line you can put the spacing double yourself as it appears in the askers question) :
sed -i '\#echo \ + /etc>>$BUFFER#a echo - /etc/cache>>$BUFFER' myfile.txt
sed -i '\#^ *echo + /etc>>\$BUFFER *$# a\
echo - /etc/cache>>$BUFFER' YourFile
It will add the line after EACH occurence of echo + /etc>>$BUFFER.
I just add the line delimiter to limit to only this exact line content (but could have heading or trailing space)
If i understood you correctly this should work:
sed 's/echo \+ .*etc>>\$BUFFER/echo + \/etc>>\$BUFFER\necho - \/etc\/cache>>\$BUFFER/'
It isn't maybe best solution (im not sure how to deal with forward slash in pattern - theorethically it should be enough to escape it like: \/ but strangely it isn't working)
This should work though
Related
I'm trying to run the command below to replace every char in DECEMBER by itself followed by $n question marks. I tried both escaping {$n} like so {$n} and leaving it as is. Yet my output just keeps being D?{$n}E?{$n}... Is it just not possible to do this with a sed?
How should i got about this.
echo 'DECEMBER' > a.txt
sed -i "s%\(.\)%\1\(?\){$n}%g" a.txt
cat a.txt
This might work for you (GNU sed):
n=5
sed -E ':a;s/[^\n]/&\n/g;x;s/^/x/;/x{'"$n"'}/{z;x;y/\n/?/;b};x;ba' file
Append a newline to each non-newline character in a line $n times then replace all newlines by the intended character ?.
N.B. The newline is chosen as the initial substitute character as it is not possible for it to be within a line (sed uses newlines to separate lines) and if the final substitution character already exists within the current line, the substitutions are correct.
Range (also, interval or limiting quantifiers), like {3} / {3,} / {3,6}, are part of regex, and not replacement patterns.
You can use
sed -i "s/./&$(for i in {1..7}; do echo -n '?'; done)/g" a.txt
See the online demo:
#!/bin/bash
sed "s/./&$(for i in {1..7}; do echo -n '?'; done)/g" <<< "DECEMBER"
# => D???????E???????C???????E???????M???????B???????E???????R???????
Here, . matches any char, and & in the replacement pattern puts it back and $(for i in {1..7}; do echo -n '?'; done) adds seven question marks right after it.
This one-liner should do the trick:
sed 's/./&'$(printf '%*s' "$n" '' | tr ' ' '?')'/g' a.txt
with the assumption that $n expands to a positive integer and the command is executed in a POSIX shell.
Efficiently using any awk in any shell on every Unix box after setting n=2:
$ awk -v n="$n" '
BEGIN {
new = sprintf("%*s",n,"")
gsub(/./,"?",new)
}
{
gsub(/./,"&"new)
print
}
' a.txt
D??E??C??E??M??B??E??R??
To make the changes "inplace" use GNU awk with -i inplace just like GNU sed has -i.
Caveat - if the character you want to use in the replacement text is & then you'd need to use gsub(/./,"\\\\\\&",new) in the BEGIN section to make it is treated as literal instead of a backreference metachar. You'd have that issue and more (e.g. handling \1 or /) with any sed solution and any solution that uses double quotes around the script would have more issues with handling $s and the solutions that have a shell script expanding unquoted would have even more issues with globbing chars.
This question already has answers here:
Using different delimiters in sed commands and range addresses
(3 answers)
Closed 1 year ago.
I have a Visual Studio project, which is developed locally. Code files have to be deployed to a remote server. The only problem is the URLs they contain, which are hard-coded.
The project contains URLs such as ?page=one. For the link to be valid on the server, it must be /page/one .
I've decided to replace all URLs in my code files with sed before deployment, but I'm stuck on slashes.
I know this is not a pretty solution, but it's simple and would save me a lot of time. The total number of strings I have to replace is fewer than 10. A total number of files which have to be checked is ~30.
An example describing my situation is below:
The command I'm using:
sed -f replace.txt < a.txt > b.txt
replace.txt which contains all the strings:
s/?page=one&/pageone/g
s/?page=two&/pagetwo/g
s/?page=three&/pagethree/g
a.txt:
?page=one&
?page=two&
?page=three&
Content of b.txt after I run my sed command:
pageone
pagetwo
pagethree
What I want b.txt to contain:
/page/one
/page/two
/page/three
The easiest way would be to use a different delimiter in your search/replace lines, e.g.:
s:?page=one&:pageone:g
You can use any character as a delimiter that's not part of either string. Or, you could escape it with a backslash:
s/\//foo/
Which would replace / with foo. You'd want to use the escaped backslash in cases where you don't know what characters might occur in the replacement strings (if they are shell variables, for example).
The s command can use any character as a delimiter; whatever character comes after the s is used. I was brought up to use a #. Like so:
s#?page=one&#/page/one#g
A very useful but lesser-known fact about sed is that the familiar s/foo/bar/ command can use any punctuation, not only slashes. A common alternative is s#foo#bar#, from which it becomes obvious how to solve your problem.
add \ before special characters:
s/\?page=one&/page\/one\//g
etc.
In a system I am developing, the string to be replaced by sed is input text from a user which is stored in a variable and passed to sed.
As noted earlier on this post, if the string contained within the sed command block contains the actual delimiter used by sed - then sed terminates on syntax error. Consider the following example:
This works:
$ VALUE=12345
$ echo "MyVar=%DEF_VALUE%" | sed -e s/%DEF_VALUE%/${VALUE}/g
MyVar=12345
This breaks:
$ VALUE=12345/6
$ echo "MyVar=%DEF_VALUE%" | sed -e s/%DEF_VALUE%/${VALUE}/g
sed: -e expression #1, char 21: unknown option to `s'
Replacing the default delimiter is not a robust solution in my case as I did not want to limit the user from entering specific characters used by sed as the delimiter (e.g. "/").
However, escaping any occurrences of the delimiter in the input string would solve the problem.
Consider the below solution of systematically escaping the delimiter character in the input string before having it parsed by sed.
Such escaping can be implemented as a replacement using sed itself, this replacement is safe even if the input string contains the delimiter - this is since the input string is not part of the sed command block:
$ VALUE=$(echo ${VALUE} | sed -e "s#/#\\\/#g")
$ echo "MyVar=%DEF_VALUE%" | sed -e s/%DEF_VALUE%/${VALUE}/g
MyVar=12345/6
I have converted this to a function to be used by various scripts:
escapeForwardSlashes() {
# Validate parameters
if [ -z "$1" ]
then
echo -e "Error - no parameter specified!"
return 1
fi
# Perform replacement
echo ${1} | sed -e "s#/#\\\/#g"
return 0
}
this line should work for your 3 examples:
sed -r 's#\?(page)=([^&]*)&#/\1/\2#g' a.txt
I used -r to save some escaping .
the line should be generic for your one, two three case. you don't have to do the sub 3 times
test with your example (a.txt):
kent$ echo "?page=one&
?page=two&
?page=three&"|sed -r 's#\?(page)=([^&]*)&#/\1/\2#g'
/page/one
/page/two
/page/three
replace.txt should be
s/?page=/\/page\//g
s/&//g
please see this article
http://netjunky.net/sed-replace-path-with-slash-separators/
Just using | instead of /
Great answer from Anonymous. \ solved my problem when I tried to escape quotes in HTML strings.
So if you use sed to return some HTML templates (on a server), use double backslash instead of single:
var htmlTemplate = "<div style=\\"color:green;\\"></div>";
A simplier alternative is using AWK as on this answer:
awk '$0="prefix"$0' file > new_file
You may use an alternative regex delimiter as a search pattern by backs lashing it:
sed '\,{some_path},d'
For the s command:
sed 's,{some_path},{other_path},'
I am trying to use unix sed command to find line numbers that match a particular regular expression. The pattern of my file is below
A<20 spaces>
<something>
<something>
..
..
A<20 spaces>
<soemthing>
<something>
I need all the line numbers of A<20 spaces>
I used sed -n '/A[ ]{20}/'= <file_name> but it does not work. If I manually type in twenty spaces it does work.
Can some one please tweak the above command to make it work.
The braces in the expression need to be escaped with backslashes:
% sed -n '/A[ ]\{20\}/=' test.txt
1
6
An alternative would be to use -E to interpret regular expressions as extended (modern) regular expressions:
% sed -nE '/A[ ]{20}/=' test.txt
1
6
Or potentially use grep instead, which takes fewer characters to specify the same search:
% grep -n 'A[ ]\{20\}' test.txt
The correct syntax would be /A \{20\}/ (and I'm failing to understand where you got your syntax from).
edit: repeat a space, not an A. not my day
use the -E or the -r switch for extended regexp
just to be sur of the content request is answered because it literraly mean "20 spaces" and not Twenty " " char that everyone understand due to the sed line sample failing (i guess this the good one so other reply are fine in this case)
sed -n "/<20 spaces>/ =" file_name
I have the following: param="/var/tmp/test"
I need to replace the word test with another word such as new_test
need a smart way to replace the last word after "/" with sed
echo 'param="/var/tmp/test"' | sed 's/\/[^\/]*"/\/REPLACEMENT"/'
param="/var/tmp/REPLACEMENT"
echo '/var/tmp/test' | sed 's/\/[^\/]*$/\/REPLACEMENT/'
/var/tmp/REPLACEMENT
Extracting bits and pieces with sed is a bit messy (as Jim Lewis says, use basename and dirname if you can) but at least you don't need a plethora of backslashes to do it if you are going the sed route since you can use the fact that the delimiter character is selectable (I like to use ! when / is too awkward, but it's arbitrary):
$ echo 'param="/var/tmp/test"' | sed ' s!/[^/"]*"!/new_test"! '
param="/var/tmp/new_test"
We can also extract just the part that was substituted, though this is easier with two substitutions in the sed control script:
$ echo 'param="/var/tmp/test"' | sed ' s!.*/!! ; s/"$// '
test
You don't need sed for this...basename and dirname are a better choice for assembling or disassembling pathnames. All those escape characters give me a headache....
param="/var/tmp/test"
param_repl=`dirname $param`/newtest
It's not clear whether param is part of the string that you need processed or it's the variable that holds the string. Assuming the latter, you can do this using only Bash (you don't say which shell you're using):
shopt -s extglob
param="/var/tmp/test"
param="${param/%\/*([^\/])//new_test}"
If param= is part of the string:
shopt -s extglob
string='param="/var/tmp/test"'
string="${string/%\/*([^\/])\"//new}"
This might work for you:
echo 'param="/var/tmp/test"' | sed -r 's#(/(([^/]*/)*))[^"]*#\1newtest#'
param="/var/tmp/newtest"
I have been through the sed one liners but am still having trouble with my goal. I want to substitue matching strings on all but the first occurrence of a line. My exact usage would be:
$ echo 'cd /Users/joeuser/bump bonding/initial trials' | sed <<MAGIC HAPPENS>
cd /Users/joeuser/bump\ bonding/initial\ trials
The line replaced the space in bump bonding with the slash space bump\ bonding so that I can execute this line (since when the spaces aren't escaped I wouldn't be able to cd to it).
Update: I solved this by just using single quotes and outputting
cd 'blah blah/thing/another space/'
and then using source to execute the command. But it didn't answer my question. I'm still curious though... how would you use sed to fix it?
s/ /\\ /2g
The 2 specifies that the second one should apply, and the g specifies that all the rest should apply too. (This probably only works on GNU sed. According to the Open Group Base Specification, "If both g and n are specified, the results are unspecified.")
You can avoid the problem with g and n
Replace all of them, then undo the first one:
sed -e 's/ /\\ /g' -e 's/\\ / /1'
Here's another method which uses the t branch-if-substituted command:
sed ':a;s/\([^ ]* .*[^\\]\) \(.*\)/\1\\ \2/;ta'
which has the advantage of leaving existing backslash-space sequences in the input intact.
use awk
$ echo cd 'blah blah/thing/another space/' | awk '{for(i=2;i<NF;i++) $i=$i"\\"}1'
cd blah\ blah/thing/another\ space/
$ echo 'cd /Users/joeuser/bump bonding/initial trials' | awk '{for(i=2;i<NF;i++) $i=$i"\\"}1'
cd /Users/joeuser/bump\ bonding/initial\ trials