Chris F.A. Johnson wrote:
> On 2006-08-21, Andy B wrote:
> >
> > Chris F.A. Johnson wrote:
> >> On 2006-08-21, Andy B wrote:
> >> > Hi Guys,
> >> >
> >> > Wonder if you can , this problem is getting me down.
> >> >
> >> > My script is falling over with a sed problem.
> >> >
> >> > NEWSTORE=JvHCdEMzDegPI
> >> > NPASS=EoWH/Q4hds7nA
> >> >
> >> > sed -e '/bill/s/'"${NEWSTORE}"'/'"${NPASS}"'/g' /tmp/temp
> >> >
> >> > The above sed command works fine when there are no "special characters"
> >> > but when they appear as above i get a sed: command garbled: error.
> >> > Tried a few things with no luck, to escape theses.
> >>
> >> That's bacause $NPASS contains a slash. Use a different delimiter
> >> with sed:
> >>
> >> sed -e "/bill/s|${NEWSTORE}|${NPASS}|g" /tmp/temp
> >
> > I would love to do this only problem is that the 2 variables
> >
> > $NEWSTORE and $NPASS, will be generated from a file that may have
> > special characters in it ie !"£$%^&* etc, so what i need sed to do is
> > read the variable in and ignore any special character that are in that
> > variable.
> >
> > Is there a way round this at all?
>
> You can escape the slashes within the variables, e.g.:
>
> NEWSTORE=$( printf "%s\n" "$NEWSTORE" | sed 's|/|\\/|g' )
>
>
> --
> Chris F.A. Johnson, author <http://cfaj.freeshell.org>
> Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress)
> ===== My code in this post, if any, assumes the POSIX locale
> ===== and is released under the GNU General Public Licence

Not for me to comment on a CFAJ post, but being a lazy admin, I would
chnage the fun chars to some thing safe and simle, tilde, dash, etc. I
used tr, worked on bash, linux. The tr needs to understand the set "[
]". My older AIX was not that smart.
printf "\n%s\n" '!"£$%^&*'|tr '[!"£$%^&*]' "~"
2 cents JB