CODEWITHSUNDEEP
jenkinssedjenkins-pipeline
emmdee
emmdee

Reputation: 1621

How to escape this sed command in a Jenkinsfile Pipeline?

I'm doing a simple substitution, and this works fine at the command line:

sed "s/pub Url =.*/pub Url = 'https:\/\/example.com:3207';/g" myfile.ts

I'm trying to run it within a Jenkinsfile, and like 40 builds later I cannot get the escape quoting right.

Pretty sure it will look something like this:

sh 'sed \\"s/pub Url =.*/pub Url = \\'https:\\\/\\\/example.com:3207\\';/g\\" myfile.ts'

Yet that results in the following error:

WorkflowScript: 4: unexpected char: '\' @ line 4, column 49. ub Url =.*/pub Url = \\'https:\\\/\\\/ex

I feel like I've tried dozens of variants but nothing is working.

Here is among the most common errors I'm getting: which points to escaping issue

sed: -e expression #1, char 1: unknown command: `"'

I really just need a pipeline expert that can likely see exactly what I'm doing wrong and know where to quote it.

As noted here: https://gist.github.com/Faheetah/e11bd0315c34ed32e681616e41279ef4 this is not uncommon to fight this type of stuff in the pipeline files and it seems like it's just trial and error.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 7135

Answers (3)

tripleee
tripleee

Reputation: 189387

Absurdly, through trial and error, I learned that backslashes need to be doubled even inside triple single quotes in a Jenkinsfile. So the mechanical solution to your problem would look like

sh '''sed "s/pub Url =.*/pub Url = 'https:\\/\\/example.com:3207';/g" myfile.ts'''

However, you can avoid the backslashitis by using a different delimiter. Just make sure you choose one which doesn't occur in the text you need to process.

sh '''sed "s%pub Url =.*%pub Url = 'https://example.com:3207';%g" myfile.ts'''

A more complex scenario is when you try to use backreferences in sed. If you naively try

sh '''sed 's/foo\(bar\|baz\)/quux\1/' file'''

you get

org.codehaus.groovy.control.MultipleCompilationErrorsException: startup failed:
WorkflowScript: 1: unexpected char: '\' @ line 1, column 17.
sh '''sed 's/foo\(bar\|baz\)/quux\1/' file'''
                 ^

Wrong as it looks, the solution is to double those backslashes.

sh '''sed 's/foo\\(bar\\|baz\\)/quux\\1/' file'''

Upvotes: 0

Rahul Kamboj
Rahul Kamboj

Reputation: 61

To add more on this... I had an issue with sed -i 's/\_/\//g' abc.txt command running fine in CLI but resulting in an unxpected char \ error in jenkins, so, i had to replace this:

sed -i 's/\_/\//g' abc.txt

with

sed -i "s/\\_/\\//g" abc.txt

To remove this error from jenkins.

Upvotes: -1

emmdee
emmdee

Reputation: 1621

Ok after much trial and error, this is working.

Looks like I had to use triple single quotes around the command. Good thing I don't need to interpolate!

sh '''sed \"s/pub Url =.*/pub Url = \\'https:\\/\\/example.com:3207\\';/g\" afile.txt'''

Hope this is helpful to someone in the future that's fighting this!

Upvotes: 3

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