Hi,

I have the following file:
[root@comp tmp]# cat test.txt
skfs user[someuser][skjfks
slfkjasklfa
fasfkjasfsa

I'm running the following command:
# sed -i 's/user\[.*?\]/user\[newuser\]/g' test.txt
the file is not changed
when i run the following
# sed -i 's/user\[.*\]/user\[newuser\]/g' test.txt
the file does change to have content of
# cat test.txt
skfs user[newuser][skjfks
slfkjasklfa
fasfkjasfsa

can anyone explain to me why the .*? didnt work? after all i do want it to be .*?

Thanks

perhaps the problem is within sed's internals... maybe *? is illegal.
have you tried it with grep already?

What are you trying to do?

The .* gives you a repetition of any number of any character, including zero. The ? would be to either include or not include the preceding character. So the syntax .*? makes no sense as far as I can tell.

How do you do search and replace with grep??

tomerbd1;

I got it to work using sed -r or by escaping the "?"

eg:
sed 's/a.*\?b/xxx/' oldfile > newfile
matches ab, or a + any number of characters--optional + b

As already noted, the "?" in the above is redundant

Apparently, sed needs one of these options when using "+" (one or more occurences) or "?" (optional). I have not completely tested, however.

But please have a look at:

This is taken from http://www.regular-expressions.info/reference.html

This says that .*? has a meeting it means non greedy.
Note also that the same regular expression works fine for me with grep its just not working with sed...

so the following is working fine and as expected for me:

Cheers,
Tink

1 members found this post helpful.

Cool construction, tink. That does it.

Getting back to the question, why doesn't .*? work in sed -- the various tools in the unix/linux toolbox use different extensions and variations of regular expressions. If you look at the O'Reilly book "Unix in a Nutshell", it gives specifics for the different tools: grep, sed, awk, etc. I think that's where I saw a table listing all the various syntax options and whether they were supported in each of the tools.

I had a look at this web site. Interesting. But, I think it does somewhat of a disservice, because it implies that regular expressions are the same from one tool or environment to another. It even says "whether that code is written in Perl, PHP, Java, a .NET language or a multitude of other languages." Unfortunately, this is not precisely true. Thus, people asking, "why doesn't this work in sed?"

The example they give right on their lead page doesn't work in standard grep. The braces need to be escaped. So \{2,4\} gives a repetition of 2 to 4 of the preceding character. But simply {2,4} doesn't work.

Because the old posix sed doesn't know about ?, I don't
think, just as it doesn't know about + ... to enable those
use -r (in GNU sed)


Cheers,
Tink

Thanks a lot for the replies
I have learned from it and now i know exactly whats going on
Thanks