Question

I often use grep and sed in my bash scripts.
For example, I use a script to remove comments from a template

In this example the comments look like:

/*#  my comments contain text and ascii art:
 *#
 *#  [box1] ------> [box2]o
 *#
#*/

My sed chain to remove these lines looks like:

sed '/^\/\*#/d' | sed '/^\s*\*#/d' | sed '/^\s*#\*\//d'

I my scripts, I have to escape chars such as \ and /, which makes the code less readable. Therefore, my question is: How can I write nice-to-read regular expressions for sed in bash scripts?

One way, I can think of, is by using another separator instead of /, as in vim where you can natively use %s#search/text#replace/text#gc (using # the as separator) and therefore allow / as unescaped character. Defining an alternative escape char would also help. I would be interested in how you solve this problem. I am also open for alternative tools in case you think it is only a sed problem.

Answer 1

You can specify different separators, as detailed here.

Note that Perl allows you to do this too, along with splitting your regexp across several lines for better readability.