I am using sed -e "s/foo/$bar/" -e "s/some/$text/" file.whatever to replace a phrase in a certain file. The problem is that the $bar string contains multiple special characters like /. So when I try to replace something in a text file using the following code...
#!/bin/bash
bar="http://stackoverflow.com/"
sed -e "s/foo/$bar/" -e "s/some/$text/ file.whatever
...then I get an error saying : sed: unknown option to s is there anything I can do about it?
You can use any delimiter. s@some@SOME@ for example. Another good delimiter is vertical-bar. Other chars can work but have special significance for some contexts such as regular expressions.
You can get this difficulty in sed regardless of what delimiters you use, especially if you don't know what the string contains. I'd pick a different method for passing the shell variables into the helper interpreter.
awk -v rep1="$bar" -v rep2="$text" '{sub(/foo/, rep1); sub(/some/, rep2); print}'
or
perl -spe 's/foo/$rep1/; s/some/$rep2/' -- -rep1="$bar" -rep2="$text"
Correctness trumps brevity in this case.
(reference for Perl example)
