special characters and sed

[cmeyers]

Hi,

I've got an oddball situation.

I'm trying to expand a shell variable string in a sed statement. The string contains a special character. In this case the character is a forward slash (/). I believe other special characters will cause a similar problem - like parentheses, brackets, etc.

Here's the problem code (I work in ksh):

STRVAR=lbm/sec
sed "s/$STRVAR/substitution text/g" /somepath/somefile

Actually the string is assigned to STRVAR by parsing a text file. So, I obviously don't have an opportunity to "escape" the forward slash. The shell expands $STRVAR and sed gets very confused - something like "garbled command".

I was hoping for some regular expression blackmagic solution with a really cool metacharacter sequence that will put this one to bed. Or maybe there is some subtle ksh variable stuff that I could do.

Any ideas? I'm at a loss.

CraigMan

 

[cmeyers]

BTW - there is no CR between "substitution" and "text". I'm not sure how this line was fractured.

 

[cmeyers]

I solved my own problem.

I used an infrequently used character like this:

sed "s~$STRVAR~substitution text~g" /path/file