Question

I believe this may be a simple question, but I’ve looked everywhere and tried some workarounds, but I still haven’t solved the problem.

Problem description:
I have to replace a character inside a file and I can do it easily using the command line:

sed -e 's/pattern1/pattern2/g' full_path_to_file/file

But when I use the same line inside a bash script I can’t seem to be able to replace it, and I don’t get an error message, just the file contents without the substitution.

#!/bin/sh

VAR1="patter1"
VAR2="patter2"

VAR3="full_path_to_file"

sed -e 's/${VAR1}/${VAR2}/g' ${VAR3}

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you very much for your time.

Answer 1

Try

sed -e "s/${VAR1}/${VAR2}/g" ${VAR3}

Bash reference says:

The characters ‘$’ and ‘`’ retain their special meaning within double quotes

Thus it will be able to resolve your variables