What do you do instead of :

sed 's/anytext/\'/g'

Hi,

If at all possible use double quotes:

sed "s/anytext/'/g"

If single quotes must be used:

sed 's/anytext/'\''/g' (that is ' followed by an escaped ' followed by a ')

Hope this helps.

Just curious why

sed 's/anytext/\'/g'

doesn't work. Seems like that should work. Is the escape character (\) taken as a literal?

Hi,

I guess that the main reason for this behavior is that bash will not expand anything between single quotes, thus all will be given to sed as-is. Sed doesn't see the \' as literal ', but as a slash followed by a single quote. This being the second single quote tells sed that the command is finished, which leaves you with an incorrect command. Simple (not fair, the inner workings of bash are sometimes hard to grasp).

Anyway hope this clears things up a bit.

Just some frosting......The key is to understand who is processing your carefully-crafted code. Bash sees it first, before SED sees it. If you read up on quoting, it's all about protecting stuff from Bash.

suppose you have something like:

sed s/xy/ab/ filename This works--with no quotes--because there is nothing that Bash sees as significant.

Then try:

cat filename | sed s/xy/'aa/ It will give you a ">" (expecting more input). Now enter a single quote. "xy" will be replaced by "aa". Why? Because the 1st single quote tells bash that more is coming, and the 2nd says "all done". (I forget what this feature is called.)