On 7/21/2016 8:26 AM, bruce wrote:

Hey Tudor, and others..

The test sed I posted works for doing a search/replace of the text inside the parens...

> foo('txt')
> foo("txt")

however.. if i wanted to craft a sed that uses the entire >>foo('txt')<< as the search.. then I run into the need to handle the parens.. and that's the issue..

this doesn't work

sed -i 's/foo('txt')/foo('/dir1/txt') /' *files.dat
sed -i 's/foo\('txt'\)/foo\('/dir1/txt'\)/' *files.dat

If you swap out the apostrophes with quotation marks it should work - Bash is what I think is getting in your way. On Fedora 23 I have the following in a text file called test.txt:

The 'test' case for changing foo('txt') to foo("txt") without changing bar('txt') to bar("txt") example.

I used the following sed command:

sed -e "s/foo('txt')/foo(\"txt\")/g" test.txt

This is the output:

The 'test' case for changing foo("txt") to foo("txt") without changing bar('txt') to bar("txt") example.

Tom