unterminated s command with seed on special characters with sed

Question

i have special characters in the content of $VALUE which I would to add in file ($FILE).

When I run this cammand :

sed -i "s|T_VALUE|$VALUE|" "$FILE"

i have an error unterminated s command

i saw some post saying i need to escape the special characters, but i do not know them upfront as $VALUE is a dynamic value. how can i solve this?

it did not help because I am still getting the error, any example that escape all the special character? — akaliza, Mar 15 '23 at 14:32
See is-it-possible-to-escape-regex-metacharacters-reliably-with-sed. — Ed Morton, Mar 16 '23 at 00:42

don_aman · Answer 1 · 2023-03-15T15:30:57.350

2

You can use Perl for fancier quoting. To avoid confusion, you can pass arguments via environment variables.

$ SUB_LH='?|'
$ SUB_RH='/\'
$ cat mydata.txt
x?|y
?|ab?|
$ SUB_LH=$SUB_LH SUB_RH=$SUB_RH perl -p -i.bak -e 's/\Q$ENV{SUB_LH}\E/$ENV{SUB_RH}/g' mydata.txt
$ cat mydata.txt
x/\y
/\ab/\

edited Mar 15 '23 at 15:30

answered Mar 15 '23 at 15:24

don_aman

1,373

Is this solution restricted to particular shells, and/or shell versions? – jubilatious1 Mar 15 '23 at 21:04
1

@jubilatious1 i don't think so, well at least for posix sh. no idea about csh and friends – don_aman Mar 16 '23 at 01:15

unterminated s command with seed on special characters with sed

1 Answers1