I'm trying to use bash's SED command in OS X and failing.
I need to change this line #"phpunit/phpunit:3.7.*", to the same but without the # (so like this "phpunit/phpunit:3.7.*", in my file.
What is the best way to do that in sed?
I tried this: sed -i -e "s/#\"phpunit/phpunit:3.7.*\",/\"phpunit/phpunit:3.7.*\"," file.txt
but that didn't work :(
I can see an obvious error, that you use the substitution separator character (the slash) inside the regular expression part. You must escape it, like:
sed -e "s/#\"phpunit\/phpunit:3.7.*\",/\"phpunit\/phpunit:3.7.*\",/" file.txt
An improvement could be to group what you want to keep, like:
sed -e "s/#\(\"phpunit\/phpunit:3.7.*\",\)/\1/" file.txt
Both solutions yield:
"phpunit/phpunit:3.7.*",
I don't use OS X, so I omitted the -i switch. In linux is enought -i with an space following it, but in your system I think you must provide a blank string, like: -i'' but not sure, so test this part.
Why not just use something like
sed 's/#//' file.txt
And if you need more specificty then
sed 's/#"php/"php/' file.txt
sed -i '' 's/#"phpunit/"phpunit/' file.txt
$ cat input
#"phpunit/phpunit:3.7.*",
Some serious back-slashing later, due to the special characters *, . and /:
$ sed 's/#"phpunit\/phpunit:3\.7\.\*",/"phpunit\/phpunit:3\.7\.\*",/' input
"phpunit/phpunit:3.7.*",
