How can I replace this string with another using sed?
 

Hey. I searched for answer before asking.
I couldn't seem to find anything that would help.
How can I use the search and replace feature using sed?
I need to replace some text on about 100 pages.

I wanted to find this
<!--#exec cgi="/cgi-bin/helper/adoption.pl" -->

and replace it with

<Script Language="JavaScript" Src="http://www.anysite/helper/one/help.php?help=adoption&r=1"></Script>";

basically I needed to change these tags on all files in a directory including the sub-directories.

I tried a few examples and got errors.
Your help will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
Dave.

You will need to escape those search and replace fields above, but it should be fairly straightforward.

Thanks.
I'll try it tonight when I get home from work.

Escape characters.... if the sed basic form is

sed s/SEARCHSTRING/REPLACESTRING/g

it is worth knowing that you don't have to use / as the delimiting character. You can use any character you please, pretty much. There are lots and lots of / in the expressions you want to search and replace and if you use / you will have to escape all of them. If instead you use ? which appears only once, or z which I think appears no-where in your urls you will have less escaping to do.

Best Wishes, Max

And the '|' character is almost never present in strings to be matched.

hey I also have the same problem. i tried what matir and mhoch3 suggested but the problem is i do not want to create new file with different name, i want to keep the same file name and modify it. if i use same name for infile and outfile, it wipes the file clean.what should i do ?

perl -pi.bak -e 's/this/that/g' file ... # make a backup

perl -pi -e 's/this/that/g' file ... # don't make a backup

While bigearsbilly's solution may work, this does require the use of perl. Have you considered just making a temporary copy of the file? Like: