I'm trying to pass a variable to sed so that all instances of this variable (in a text file) will be replaced with nothing. However, the value of this variable will always be a folder location e.g. "C:\Program Files\Folder1"
I currently have
sed "s/$VAR1//g" file.txt > file_processed.txt
Unfortunately this isn't working. I have also tried
sed s/$VAR1//g file.txt > file_processed.txt
sed 's/'$VAR1'//g file.txt > file_processed.txt
I am also using Korn Shell.
Please be gentle with your responses puts on flame-proof jacket
By "not working" I assume you mean the substitution doesn't come out the way you like it, because the backslashes are interpreted by sed, not used as literal characters in the substitution.
To solve that, you basically have to double every backslash in the substitution string before giving it to sed.
echo "$VAR" | sed -e 's/\\/\\\\/g' -e 's/.*/s%&%%g/' | sed -f - file.txt >file_processed
If your sed doesn't like getting a dash (standard input) as the argument to the -f option, some further workarounds are needed. Maybe you could simply use Perl instead /-:
The sed script works here, not sure how to fix it. Can you identify which part gives the error? (Try remove parts of the script starting from the end, until you no longer get the error message.) I'm guessing you might need to tweak the number of backslashes in s/\\/\\\\/g but that's a cheap shot.
