Using Sed under CMD.exe (windows)
 

I've been looking for a utility to so a simple search and replace string so I downloaded Sed from http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/.

What I want to do is actually a search and replace on Pathname and I want to pass a CMD environment like %HOMEPATH% or %CD%.

But the problem arises becuase Sed sees the single slashes in those environment as delimeters.

Is there anyway to work around this?

I don't have to use Sed, but I want it to be a small self contained executable. I don't want to install a full blown scripting language like Perl or Python just to do this.

You can use (almost) any delimiter in s commands:

This:
..does the same thing as:
..or:
This doesn't work though:
because this is not an s command. Should be possible to work around this, I guess.

The problem is that even if you use another delimiter, it still won't treat the single '\' as a literal. It still treats this as some kind of operand.

I guess sed doesn't work with variables that contain a path name.. I guess I have to try something else.

You could pipe through tr and replace the slashes (which
to sed indeed are escape characters) with "|" for example,
and then do the search and replace, and tr again afterwards.


Cheers,
Tink

Thanks, you pointed me in the right direction. I had to figure out what 'tr' was. It turned out to be in the list of WIN 32GNU utilities as well. However, I had to use '?' as the delimiter because it was the only character that was neither a) an operand for the 'tr' or 'sed' nor b) a legal character for a windows file/folder name.

To get this to work, I had to do something like

echo set WINPATH_TR=%WINPATH%|tr '\\' '?' > WINPATH_TR.bat
call WINPATH_TR.bat
del WINPATH_TR.bat

This would then set WINPATH_TR to something like c:?windows?system which I could pass down to sed.

(I'm not familiar with the affero)

Congratulations :)


Cheers,
Tink