CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashsed
Cody
Cody

Reputation: 127

Replacing a whole line using Sed with different delimiter

This was previously asked at the below url, but only done using the a forward-slash as the delimiter. https://stackoverflow.com/a/11245501/2520289

What is the proper syntax to do the exact same thing but with any of the other compatible delimiters for sed?

I have the delimiter changed for universal compatibility across most bash environments. (git-bash/any linux)

For example, I am currently doing the below snippet to replace any matches of the specific string but not the whole line.

function misc_findReplace()
{
    VARIABLE_FIND="$1"
    VARIABLE_REPLACE="$2"
    VARIABLE_FILE="$3"

    echo "Finding: $VARIABLE_FIND"
    echo "Replacing With: $VARIABLE_REPLACE"
    echo "File to Operate On: $VARIABLE_FILE"

    sed -i "s@${VARIABLE_FIND}@c${VARIABLE_REPLACE}@g" "$VARIABLE_FILE"
}

FILE_TO_WORK_WITH="/path/to/my/file.properties"

STRING_TO_FIND="destination_hostname=<destination_hostname>"
STRING_TO_REPLACE="destination_hostname=localhost"
misc_findReplace "$STRING_TO_FIND" "$STRING_TO_REPLACE" "$FILE_TO_WORK_WITH"

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1391

Answers (2)

stas chern
stas chern

Reputation: 71

To use different delimiters in sed, you want to escape the first occurance with a backslash. such, the correct command would be sed -i "\@${VARIABLE_FIND}@c${VARIABLE_REPLACE}" "$VARIABLE_FILE"

Upvotes: 3

Thomas
Thomas

Reputation: 182000

If I understand your question correctly, you have some text in a variable VARIABLE_FIND which may contain slashes, and you want to replace all lines that contain that text by $VARIABLE_REPLACE.

This sed command will do that:

sed -i "/${VARIABLE_FIND//\//\\/}/c\\${VARIABLE_REPLACE}" "$VARIABLE_FILE"

It uses the same commands as in the answer you linked to but first escapes $VARIABLE_FIND by replacing each / character by \/.

The way that's done is with bash's construct ${var//search/replace}, plus some extra backslashes for escaping inside double quotes.

Demo:

$ VARIABLE_FIND=/foo/
$ VARIABLE_REPLACE=This line has been replaced
$ echo -e 'some/foo/line\nsome/bar/line' | sed "/${VARIABLE_FIND//\//\\/}/c\\${VARIABLE_REPLACE}"
This line has been replaced
some/bar/line

Upvotes: 1

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