Question

I have an variable

qsubFile="submitJob.sh"

echo $qsubFile returns submitJob.sh without the double quotes.

Now, I want to find the line containing the string qsubFile="someOtherFile.sh" and replace it to qsubFile="submitJob.sh" in the file "write.sh".

I tried using

sed -i '/qsubFile=/c\qsubFile="'"$qsubFile"'"' write.sh

qsubFile=""

I can’t seem to get the proper syntax for this.

but it replaces it as

Answer 1

You just need single quotes for sed to do this, there is no problem with the double quotes inside the single quotes:

sed -i 's/qsubFile="someOtherFile.sh"/qsubFile="submitJob.sh"/g' write.sh

If "someOtherFile.sh" isn’t a fixed string in write.sh than use the follow to replace them all:

$ sed  -i 's/qsubFile="[^"]*"/qsubFile="submitJob.sh"/g' write.sh

Regex "[^"]*":

"      # double quote
[^"]*  # Anything not a double quote
"      # double quote

Seems I misread the question the first time the correct quoting is to use the variable $qsubFile is, you missed the last /:

sed -i 's/qsubFile="[^"]*"/qsubFile="'"$qsubFile"'"/g' write.sh