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sed : using colons as separators instead of forward slashes

Terminal - sed : using colons as separators instead of forward slashes
sed "s:/old/direcory/:/new/directory/:" <file>
2009-08-06 00:37:45
User: thebillywayne
Functions: sed
8
Up
Down
sed : using colons as separators instead of forward slashes

Having to escape forwardslashes when using sed can be a pain. However, it's possible to instead of using / as the separator to use : .

I found this by trying to substitute $PWD into my pattern, like so

sed "s/~.*/$PWD/" file.txt

Of course, $PWD will expand to a character string that begins with a / , which will make sed spit out an error such as "sed: -e expression #1, char 8: unknown option to `s'".

So simply changing it to

sed "s:~.*:$PWD:" file.txt

did the trick.

Show sample output | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

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Terminal - Alternatives

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What others think

From the command "info sed":

`\%REGEXP%'

(The `%' may be replaced by any other single character.)

This also matches the regular expression REGEXP, but allows one to

use a different delimiter than `/'. This is particularly useful

if the REGEXP itself contains a lot of slashes, since it avoids

the tedious escaping of every `/'. If REGEXP itself includes any

delimiter characters, each must be escaped by a backslash (`\').

So, you can use not only ":", but any character you like. At times I get myself using "!" and "%" as delimiters too.

Comment by Patola 197 weeks and 5 days ago

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