Question

I have a file1 that has some PHP code in it. I need to find the following: action="blahblah" and replace it with action="error.php". Problem is, I don’t know how many characters are between the quotes in the original.

Here’s what I have that doesn’t work:

sed 's:action="^[^"]*":action="error.php":' <file1> file2

How can I do this?

Answer 1

Why have you got the ^ start-of-line marker before the character class? Try it with:

sed 's:action="[^"]*":action="error.php":' <file1 > file2

Here’s a transcript showing your version alongside that correction:

pax$ echo 'blah action="something" blah' | sed '
...$    s:action="^[^"]*":action="error.php":'
blah action="something" blah

pax$ echo 'blah action="something" blah' | sed '
...$    s:action="[^"]*":action="error.php":'
blah action="error.php" blah