Hi,

I am trying to use the output of a perl command with sed, but I get this error:

The command I am using is:

Can someone tell me what the corect way of doing this is?

Running the perl command like this goes fine b.t.w:

Thanks for your help.

Regards,

Ben

hello daYz. please show us the output of perl file.pl enclosed in quotes.

Hi konsolebox,

From your answer I already understood what the problem was. The output of the perl command contained characters that where causing the problem. I don't know which exactly, but some of them could be interpreted by bash (like / and $ for example.)
I am going to look for an anternitive way to accomplish what I want.

Thanks for getting me on the right way.

Regards,

Ben

Ok no prob. I'm not sure but perhaps you need to use single quotes.

# eval 'sed s/"expression"/'"'`perl file.pl`'/" file

Good luck there.

konsolebox,

I do not understand the eval command. Can you explain to me why you use it here?

You example does not work also. Can you tell me what part I should enclose in single quotes? (The expression is actually a variable b.t.w.)

I have tried it this way but the output of the perl command here is different then when I run just the perl command:

output:
gives:

When I add `perl file` to a variable (like so a=`perl file.pl`), the variable also gets that different value than when the perl command is just run from the command line.


The file.pl file actually contains hexadecimal characters that are converted to ascii characters when the file is executed.

The perl file looks like this:

Thanks for your help.

Regards,

Ben

the output of the perl command has double quotes in it so we need to use single quotes but text in single quotes are not expanded. for example

# echo '`echo a`'

will just print `echo a` and not a. so we need to use eval:

# eval "echo '`echo a`'"

will print a

btw try to use this instead:

# eval REPLACE='`perl file.pl`'

then

# eval sed s/\"${EXPR}\"/\'${REPLACE}\'/ file

or put them together

# eval sed s/\"${EXPR}\"/\'`perl file.pl`\'/ file

Thanks for your explenation konsolebox.

When I make use of command substitution with the perl command, some characters put on the screen are different than when the perl command is just run from the command line. Can you tell me why that happens?

Regards,

Ben

are you talking about the difference of the output to the screen and output to the file?

perhaps the character 'ò' (hex f2) is just not printed in the screen.

I meant the difference between the characters that are put on the screen when the perl command is just run from the command line and when I implement command substitution with the perl command.
Sorry I can not explain that well.

Like so:

It seems to me that both commands would output the same charcaters, but there are some differences.

If I make use of the '\xBF' character for example, with the first command:

is put on the screen.

and with command 2:

is put on the screen.

Ben

Never mind the last question. The problem of the difference in characters was caused by a minimal version of Cygwin that I am using. It does not happen on my Linux system.

Thanks for your help konsolebox

Regards,

Ben