[SOLVED] Replacing "slashes" with back slashes

kushalkoolwal · 01-07-2011, 07:34 PM

Usually if I have to replace a character in a string I used the sed /s/ command. However, I am having some difficulty in doing the same thing when I have the following string in a variable in my shell script and I need to replace all the forward slashes ("/") to backslashes ("\"). For example, this is what I am doing:

Code:

URL=<\\\\software\\projects\\new development\\code\PartA/release/DEV-0.01_RC1/>
echo $URL | sed 's/\/\/g'
sed: -e expression #1, char 7: unterminated `s' command

Not sure how to escape the slashes in this case.

AlucardZero · 01-07-2011, 07:48 PM

Code:

 echo $URL | sed 's/\//\\/g'

(a) / and \ are both special in regular expressions; you need to escape both. With spaces (for clarity; this will break the substitution): s/ \/ / \\ /g
(b) Not sure how you meant your original replace to work, but how I read it, you were trying to replace /s with /s.

Code:

$ echo $URL | sed 's/\//\\/g'
<\\software\projects\new development\code\PartA\release\DEV-0.01_RC1\>

grail · 01-08-2011, 01:16 AM

To make things a little clearer to you can also change the 's' delimiter:

Code:

$ echo $URL | sed 's@/@\\@g'

This also has the added bonus of not needing to escape the forward slash