Re: [PLUG] the character least likely to find in a Unix file name

[TuskenTower <tuskentower@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 3:29 PM, Paul L. Snyder<plsnyder@drexel.edu> wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Aug 2009, TuskenTower wrote:
>
>> We would like to have a sed script that modifies the PATH in a way
>> that follows the principle of least astonishment.
>
> Walt's solution is nice and tidy if you don't mind using Perl.  If you're
> wedded to sed, here's a possible solution: before using the environment
> variables in the s-command, pass each of them through sed to escape your
> desired delimiter.
>
> For example:
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> #!/bin/sh
>
> P=/foo:/bar:/bar/baz
> O="/ba"
> N="/co/co"
>
> echo $P
> P=$(echo $P|sed "s/$(echo $O|sed 's:/:\\/:g')/$(echo $N|sed 's:/:\\/:g')/g")
> echo $P
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Tried this out in zsh's sh emulation, and it seems to work as advertised.
> I believe most current sh implementations should support $(...) for command
> substitution, but I'll defer to JP on that.  $(...) is more convenient than
> `...` as it can be nested without escapes.
>
> Note that the above replaces all occurences of '/ba' that appear in P.  If
> you're trying to replace a single occurence of a complete entry in the path
> variable, you'll need to be careful that your old string is guaranteed not
> to match a substring that appears earlier in the path.  (And, of course,
> you won't want to use the 'g' flag on the outer sed.) This could be tricky,
> and you might do better to break the path string up by the ':' delimiters
> and look at each entry individually.
>
> Paul

Paul,
I like those options.  I hadn't thought about sanitizing the input strings.

thanks,
Amul
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