Home/ Questions/Q 148003
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-11T08:52:51+00:00

If I run these commands from a script: #my.sh PWD=bla sed ‘s/xxx/’$PWD’/’ … $

  • 0

If I run these commands from a script:

#my.sh PWD=bla sed 's/xxx/'$PWD'/' ... $ ./my.sh xxx bla

it is fine.

But, if I run:

#my.sh sed 's/xxx/'$PWD'/' ... $ ./my.sh $ sed: -e expression #1, char 8: Unknown option to `s'

I read in tutorials that to substitute environment variables from shell you need to stop, and ‘out quote’ the $varname part so that it is not substituted directly, which is what I did, and which works only if the variable is defined immediately before.

How can I get sed to recognize a $var as an environment variable as it is defined in the shell?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Your two examples look identical, which makes problems hard to diagnose. Potential problems:

    1. You may need double quotes, as in sed 's/xxx/''$PWD''/'

    2. $PWD may contain a slash, in which case you need to find a character not contained in $PWD to use as a delimiter.

    To nail both issues at once, perhaps

    sed 's@xxx@''$PWD''@'
    • 0