CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windowsbashbatch-fileunixtr
llja
llja

Reputation: 3

Get UnxUtils tr.exe for Windows work like the Unix tr with character escaping

From another cross-platform program I would like to use the UnxUtils tr.exe program exactly as under Unix but I can't manage to get it to work, the issue being the escaping. Here's an example.

Create a file blah.txt with content 

%^&<>|'`,;=()!\"\\[].*?

Then

type blah.txt | tr.exe "*" "X"

tr.exe: extra operand `blah.txt' Try `tr.exe --help' for more information.

The problem is that Windows expands * to the files in the directory. But under Unix this is no problem. No matter what I tried, I can't escape the * properly under Windows. Similarly with the quotation mark ". Even if I can figure out how to rewrite the escaping properly, it will be a mess to apply this correction to a set of characters.

I managed to get sed.exe from the UnxTools to work consistently because here I can use program files with the -f option so that I don't need to escape things.

Any ideas?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1083

Answers (2)

MC ND
MC ND

Reputation: 70943

Some easy portable ways to deal with the file globbing when using * (by the way, as MSalters points it is not a windows feature)

type blah.txt | tr.exe \52 X
type blah.txt | tr.exe [=*=] X

Upvotes: 0

MSalters
MSalters

Reputation: 179991

The problem is that Windows (CMD.EXE) does not expand *. Ever. That's why escaping won't fix it. That's how dir /s *.txt can find text files in subdirectories. It wouldn't work if *.txt was expanded in the directory where you currently are.

That's why Windows tools need to handle *. Apparently tr.exe gets it wrong.

Upvotes: 1

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