Question

I am new to shell scripts. I want to read a file line by line, which contains arguments and if the arguments contains any spaces in it, I want to replace it by enclosing with quotes.

For example if the file (test.dat) contains:

-DtestArgument1=/path/to a/text file
-DtestArgument2=/path/to a/text file

After parsing the above file, shell script should prepare the string with following:

-DtestArgument1="/path/to a/text file" -DtestArgument2="/path/to a/text file"

Here is my shell script:

while read ARGUMENT; do
    ARGUMENT=`echo ${ARGUMENT} | tr "\n" " "`
        if [[ "${ARGUMENT}" =~ " " ]]; then
            ARGUMENT=`echo $ARGUMENT | sed 's/\^(-D.*\)=(.*)/\1=\"\2\"/g'`
            NEW_ARGUMENT="${NEW_ARGUMENT} ${ARGUMENT}"
        else
            echo "doesn't contains spaces"
            NEW_ARGUMENT="${NEW_ARGUMENT} ${ARGUMENT}"
        fi
    done < test.dat

But it’s throwing the following error:

sed: -e expression #1, char 28: Unmatched ) or \)

The code should be compatible with all shells.

Answer 1

The sed parentheses should be escaped:

ARGUMENT=`echo $ARGUMENT | sed "s/\^\(-D.*\)=\(.*\)/\1=\"\2\"/g"`

One place you did, in 3 places you forgot… BTW, I generally use " quotation.

If you prefer '-style, do like this:

ARGUMENT=`echo $ARGUMENT | sed 's/\^(-D.*)=(.*)/\1="\2"/g'`