Question

I am ok with regular expressions in Perl but not had to do it in BASH before.

I tried to google for some sort of tutorial on it but didn’t see any really good ones yet the way there are with Perl.

What I am trying to achieve is to strip /home/devtestdocs/devtestdocs-repo/ out of a variable called $filename and replace it with another variable called $testdocsdirurl

Hopefully that makes sense and if anybody has any good links that would be much appreciated.

Another way might be is if there is already a function someone has written to do a find and replace in bash.

Answer 1

sed is the typical weapon of choice for string manipulation in Unix:

echo $filename | sed s/\\/home\\/devtestdocs\\/devtestdocs-repo\\//$testdocsdirurl/

Also, as hop suggests, you can use the @ syntax to avoid escaping the path:

echo $filename | sed s@/home/devtestdocs/devtestdocs-repo/@$testdocsdirurl@