DOS to UNIX path substitution within a file

Question

I have a file that contains this kind of paths:

C:\bad\foo.c
C:\good\foo.c
C:\good\bar\foo.c
C:\good\bar\[variable subdir count]\foo.c

And I would like to get the following file:

C:\bad\foo.c
C:/good/foo.c
C:/good/bar/foo.c
C:/good/bar/[variable subdir count]/foo.c

Note that the non matching path should not be modified.

I know how to do this with sed for a fixed number of subdir, but a variable number is giving me trouble. Actually, I would have to use many s/x/y/ expressions (as many as the max depth... not very elegant).

May be with awk, but this kind of magic is beyond my skills.

FYI, I need this trick to correct some gcov binary files on a cygwin platform.

---

I am dealing with binary files; therefore, I might have the following kind of data:

bindata\bindata%bindataC:\good\foo.c

which should be translated as:

bindata\bindata%bindataC:/good/foo.c

The first \ must not be translated, despite that it is on the same line.

However, I have just checked my .gcno files while editing this text and it looks like all the paths are flanked with zeros, so most of the answers below should fit.

Answer 1

sed -e '/^C:\\good/ s/\\/\//g' input_file.txt