Question

I have done several searches on this and while the solutions seem obvious, I can’t seem to get a definite one for my particular situation. I have a file that contains a string “${string}” and I would like to replace it with another string that happens to be a file path “/tmp/myfilepath”.

“sed” apparently seems to be the most popular choice to do this in linux. I am using the following command:

sed -i 's/"${string}"/"/tmp/myfilepath"/g' myFile.txt

I get the error message…

sed: -e expression #1, char 5: unknown option to `s'

I am using the double quotes because it has additional slashes in it. I have tried mix-matching single and double quotes, but nothing seems to work. Any thoughts or solutions? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Use a different delimiter:

sed -i "s|${string}|/tmp/myfilepath|g" myFile.txt

If the string can contain special characters, fix it first.