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Old 02-19-2008, 02:42 PM   #1
Gracie Belle
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Registered: Feb 2008
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Unhappy help! wildcard expansion in variables using sed???


Sed isn't parsing the '*' symbol to automatically expand a variable term

this is what my code looks like

infile=/data/*DTI*/somefile
outfile=/data/*DTI*/tempfile

sed 's/whatever/ever/' "$infile" > "$outfile"


the file paths are actually something like /data/3450_DTI_33452/somefile
if i do echo $infile it prints the path correctly,
however sed reads $infile literally as /data/*DTI*/somefile and thus cannot find the file.

anyone know anyway around this???

help!

Last edited by Gracie Belle; 02-19-2008 at 02:51 PM.
 
Old 02-20-2008, 07:09 AM   #2
pixellany
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Remove the quotes from $infile and $outfile.

The "*" does expansion in BASH, but not in SED. The double quotes are telling BASH to not process any special character except the "$", and to pass the string literally to SED.
 
Old 02-20-2008, 07:22 AM   #3
Gracie Belle
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Cool

beautiful! thank you!
 
Old 02-20-2008, 07:43 AM   #4
jschiwal
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Gracie Belle View Post
Sed isn't parsing the '*' symbol to automatically expand a variable term

this is what my code looks like

infile=/data/*DTI*/somefile
outfile=/data/*DTI*/tempfile

sed 's/whatever/ever/' "$infile" > "$outfile"


the file paths are actually something like /data/3450_DTI_33452/somefile
if i do echo $infile it prints the path correctly,
however sed reads $infile literally as /data/*DTI*/somefile and thus cannot find the file.

anyone know anyway around this???

help!
If you have to matching infile directories:
3450_DTI_33452/somefile
3451_DTI_33452/somefile

The infile will become:
3450_DTI_33452/somefile 3451_DTI_33452/somefile

So the sed line would expand to

sed 's/whatever/ever/' 3450_DTI_33452/somefile 3451_DTI_33452/somefile > 3450_DTI_33452/tempfile 3451_DTI_33452/tempfile

Which isn't what you want. You could either edit them in place:
sed -i 's/whatever/ever/' "$infile"

or use a loop:
for infile in /data/*DTI*/somefile; do
sed 's/whatever/ever/' "$infile" > "${outfile/somefile/tmpfile}"
done
 
  


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