Question

I want to escape a DOS filename so I can use it with sed. I have a DOS batch file something like this:

set FILENAME=%~f1  sed 's/Some Pattern/%FILENAME%/' inputfile 

(Note: %~f1 – expands %1 to a Fully qualified path name – C:\utils\MyFile.txt)

I found that the backslashes in %FILENAME% are just escaping the next letter.

How can I double them up so that they are escaped?

(I have cygwin installed so feel free to use any other *nix commands)

Solution

Combining Jeremy and Alexandru Nedelcu’s suggestions, and using | for the delimiter in the sed command I have

set FILENAME=%~f1 cygpath 's|Some Pattern|%FILENAME%|' >sedcmd.tmp sed -f sedcmd.tmp inputfile del /q sedcmd.tmp 

Answer 1

This will work. It’s messy because in BAT files you can’t use set var=`cmd` like you can in unix. The fact that echo doesn’t understand quotes is also messy, and could lead to trouble if Some Pattern contains shell meta characters.

set FILENAME=%~f1 echo s/Some Pattern/%FILENAME%/ | sed -e 's/\\/\\\\/g' >sedcmd.tmp sed -f sedcmd.tmp inputfile del /q sedcmd.tmp 

[Edited]: I am suprised that it didn’t work for you. I just tested it, and it worked on my machine. I am using sed from http://sourceforge.net/projects/unxutils and using cmd.exe to run those commands in a bat file.