I need to modify a file that contains \\tsus.fbfs.com\appsdata\StormLoss\Production\ and replace the \\tsus.fbfs.com\appsdata\StormLoss\Production\ line with rm -f /mnt/nfsvol/PC/SLR/

I have tried:

sudo find /home/appadmin/ -name sql.out -execdir sed -i 's#\\tsus.fbfs.com\appsdata\StormLoss\Production\#"rm -f /mnt/nfsvol/PC/SLR/"#' {} \;

but it provides an error on the second \. I need to change this in place and not redirect to another file.

Is this possible? I have used sed and awk before but not extensively.

Thank you!

Eeekkkk, gag, yuck!!!

You have "DOS-slashes"---Real men use "Unix-slashes"...... (I can never remember which is forward and which is back.....)

In regular expressions and many other places, "\" is the "escape" character. To use it literally, you need to---you guessed it---ESCAPE it!!

Typically, "\\" means a literal "\"

This illustrates the point (I created the file "esc" for the purpose):
What I'm stuck on is that I cannot seem to use the same approach in SED....

Works fine here, just double up the slashes:

My mistake!!---I was using the wrong SED syntax

Try this as an aide-memoire: the conventional direction of writing is left to right and the conventional direction of progress (forward, back) is down to up.

Ah yes!!

Linux is forward, Windows is backward

In Linux we use \ to escape (from Windows)


And remember that Unix came first---when DOS arrived, they had to have a new look.

okay, we got it figured out. thank you for the replies and the explanation of forward/back slash.

We just needed to double the '\' in each instance and it worked.

sudo find /home/appadmin/ -name sql.out -execdir sed -i 's#\\\\tsus.fbfs.com\\appsdata\\StormLoss\\Production\\#"rm -f /mnt/nfsvol/PC/SLR/"#' {} \;

If it works now, mark the thread as Solved (in Thread Tools).