Question

I have script file which replaces one word with other in files .

this is piece of code I use .now the problem I face is when Var1 and Var2 are path names .I m pretty new to shell scripting .I know i should put a escape sequence in front .since var1 and var2 are read from csv files i cant manually put escape sequences on them .is ther a way to detect the special charaters before this command and replace them with escape sequence

$f is a file name

sed -i "s/$Var1/$Var2/g" "$f"

Answer 1

hy,

you can use a different character for separating statement :

sed "s%PATTERN%PATTERN%"

the first character seen by sed, after the command, will be used for separating your patterns.

In your example, this could be :

sed -i "s%$Var1%$Var2%g" "$f"

then $Var1 and $Var2 could hold any / but not %.
if you have to use the separator as pattern, you must escape it with \.