sed help - Command garbled

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,

First post for a noob so please go easy with me :slight_smile:

I have a XML block that is originally like this:

<SETNAME>somecrap/THIS</SETNAME>

and I would like it be replaced with, in the original file:

<SETNAME>THIS</SETNAME>

I tried to use:

sed 's/.*\<SETNAME\>.*/\<SETNAME\>THIS\</SETNAME\>/g' folder/file.xml

And it returned:

sed: command garbled:

I then replaced sed with perl -pi -e but ended up having this error message:

Search pattern not terminated at -e line 1.

Could you please help? This is a step in my bash script running in Unix.

Thanks a lot!

2

Instead of using sed "s/.../.../g", use an alternative delimiter. i.e. sed "s@...@...@g".

1 Like
3

That totally did the trick, thanks so much and I am glad that I have found such an active community to help me out!

4

Try it this way:

$ echo '<SETNAME>somecrap/THIS</SETNAME>' |
  sed 's|\(<SETNAME>\)[[:alnum:]]*/\([[:alnum:]]*<\/SETNAME>\)|\1\2|'
<SETNAME>THIS</SETNAME>
1 Like
5

Thanks spacebar, Scott's method worked for me so I guess I'll use his :slight_smile:

Thanks a lot for your help though!