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trouble backreferencing with sed

Hi all,

I'm running Fedora8 on an AMD x64 have some iterating text in a flat file I'd like to change, but keep the iteration.

For example, parts of my file say "Ge1:1 then some text, Ge1:2 then some more text...Ge1:22...."

I'd like to replace "Ge1:n" with "<sub>n</sub>" - basically, I'm formatting something in HTML and want to put the number after the colon into superscript and lose the "Ge1:"

I'm reading a sed tutorial (see link below) and came up with the following:

sed s/Ge1\:\([0-9]*\)/\<sub\>\1\<\\/sub\>/ a.txt > b.txt

But it doesn't replace anything.

When I run: sed s/Ge1\:[0-9]*\ /\<sub\>\<\\/sub\>/ a.txt > b.txt it works fine, but I lose "n"

Does anyone know why the "\1" isn't recognizing the "\([0-9]*\)" ?

http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sed.html

Thanks, William

You haven't quoted the sed substitution, and the shell is eating the backslashes. Place quotes around your expression. Also, you can use a different substitution field delimiter to reduce the backslashes. Finally, don't backslash characters that don't need to be escaped.

Here's a solution:

Code:

sed 's-Ge1:\([0-9]*\)-<sub>\1<\/sub>-'

Note how I changed s/x/y/ into s-x-y-