Question

I am trying to write a script that configures a config file used by a nother script. I am trying to use sed like this

sed -c -i "s/\($TARGET_KEY *= *\).*/\1$REPLACEMENT_VALUE/" $CONFIG_FILE

But it’s not working as it is intended to it strips the quotation marks and i cant figure out how to write it so it dont.

the second problem is that when i run this on Mac OS the out put is an error:

sed: illegal option -- c
usage: sed script [-Ealn] [-i extension] [file ...]
   sed [-Ealn] [-i extension] [-e script] ... [-f script_file] ... [file ...]

I am new to usage of sed so please forgive my lack of skills in this area.

Answer 1

see the test below, I didn’t add “-i”, just print the output. you can add -i if you need:

kent$  cat c.conf 
key1="value1"
foo   =   "fooValue"
bar="barValue"

kent$  echo $k1
foo

kent$  echo $v1
foo_new

kent$  sed -r "s/($k1 *= *\").*/\1$v1\"/" c.conf
key1="value1"
foo   =   "foo_new"
bar="barValue"