Sed to make global replacements.

[Randal Schwartz]

In article <37090 at ames.arc.nasa.gov>, gahooten at orion (Gregory A. Hooten) writes:
| I am working with sed on a file, and need to make a global replacement, but 
| what I am replacing are special characters to sed.  I do not know how to 
| replace them.  
| 
| I would like to change the characters \(12 to 1/2, but every thing I try
| thinks the \( is the start of a character group.  I would like any help 
| possible on this problem.  

In sed, you need to escape the backslash, as in:

% sed 's,\\(12,1/2,g' <old >new

Now, with Perl (of course, you knew it was coming :-), if you had a
whole directory full of these files, you could perform this
substitution, saving the original files as filename.bak, with:

% perl -p -i.bak -e 's,\\(12,1/2,g;' *

Cool, eh?  No fuss, no muss, and all in one process.

Just another Perl hacker, waiting for comp.lang.perl...
-- 
/== Randal L. Schwartz, Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095 ====\
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