command line search and replace

[Randy Brown]

Hi all,

When I try the following, perl reads the * as a literal character, instead of my intent as a global value. Anyone see what I am missing?

perl -pi -e "s/<provider-url>file:*<\/provider-url>/REPLACED/g" testfile.txt


In the file testfile.txt, the line will be something like this: <provider-url>file:/opt/usr/bin/somewhere</provider-url>

I want to replace /opt/usr/bin/somewhere with something else, but I cannot assume what the value between <provider-url>file: and </provider-url> will be.

Thanks for any advice.

Randy



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[Drieux]

On Dec 30, 2003, at 4:51 PM, Randy Brown wrote:

> When I try the following, perl reads the * as a literal character,
> instead of my intent as a global value. Anyone see what I am missing?
>
> perl -pi -e "s/<provider-url>file:*<\/provider-url>/REPLACED/g"
> testfile.txt

you might want to revisit

perldoc perlretut

since what you are in the midst of is a regular expression
and it is not clear to me that you really wanted to assert

zero or more ":"

rather than say

zero or more "any characters"

which would have been

perl -pi -e "s/<provider-url>file:.*<\/provider-url>/REPLACED/g"
testfile.txt

"." is the "wild card" character, which you want to have
zero or more of, yes?


ciao
drieux

---

[Drieux]

On Dec 31, 2003, at 8:22 AM, Randy Brown wrote:

> Ah yes, now the real stumper:
>
> The line:
> perl -pi -e 's/<provider-url>file:.*<\/provider-url>/REPLACED/'
> testfile.txt
> does in fact work fine from the commandline in unix.
>
> However, when it is called from a ksh script, it does not function.
> Any ideas? I have tried many possible combinations that I can think of.

[..]

Well the obvious part of the problem is

how married are you to the ksh script?

The problem you are going to be running into
in these issues remains

"who did which interpolation when,
and where to what?"

As well as which is the real problem that
you are bumping your head into.

Allow me to illustrate:

meatbop: 60:] ./smack.ksh
../smack.ksh: Command not found.
meatbop: 61:] which ksh
ksh: Command not found.
meatbop: 66:]

vladimir: 55:] ./smack*
vladimir: 56:] cat *.ksh
#!/bin/ksh

perl -pi -e 's/<provider-url>file:.*<\/provider-url>/REPLACED/'
testfile.txt

vladimir: 57:] cat *.txt
REPLACED
vladimir: 58:]

Is the problem that you do not have ksh on the
machine that you tried to run the perl in the ksh script?

since that smack.ksh has no problem running the command
and doing the dance on a host where there is both perl and ksh.

ciao
drieux