I have tried this:
sed -i 's/'Twas/It certainly was/g' *.txt
any suggestions??
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I think I know what's wrong, but in the future, please describe what happened, as well as what you expected to happen, when asking a question like this. That makes it much easier for people to figure out what's going on.zwol– zwol2011-11-03 23:13:51 +00:00Commented Nov 3, 2011 at 23:13
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3 Answers
Use double quotes
sed -i "s/'Twas/It certainly was/g" *.txt
Comments
The apostrophe in 'Twas is being interpreted as a close quote (by the shell, not sed), and then the subsequent single quote after /g is being interpreted as an open quote, which cheerfully gobbles all the way to the end of the script (or the command prompt, and then you get the mysterious > that means the shell thinks there's more to come). For this situation,
sed -i "s/'Twas/It certainly was/g" *.txt
should work; however, shell double-quoted strings do a lot of stuff you don't usually want with sed programs. If there were any regexp metacharacters at all in there I'd do instead
sed -i 's/'\''Twas/It certainly was/g' *.txt
3 Comments
zwol
You can't do that easily with
sed because it doesn't support word-boundary matches. But perl -pi~ -e 's/\bthe\b/a/g; s/\bThe\b/A/g' will do it. I don't know any clever way to do both replacements with one regexp, but maybe someone else does.Try using following
grep -rl "Old string" directoryPath | xargs sed -i 's/oldString/new String/g'
Example :
grep -rl 10.113.1.115 matchdir | xargs sed -i 's/10.113.1.115/10.113.1.65/g'
