I will introduce what my question is about before actually asking - feel free to skip this section!
Some background info about my setup
To update files manually in a software system, I am creating a bash script to remove all files that are not present in the new version, using diff:
for i in $(diff -r old new 2>/dev/null | grep "Only in old" | cut -d "/" -f 3- | sed "s/: /\//g"); do echo "rm -f $i" >> REMOVEOLDFILES.sh; done
This works fine. However, apparently my files often have a dollar sign ($) in the filename, this is due to some permutations of the GWT framework. Here is one example line from the above created bash script:
rm -f var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/classes/ExampleFile$3$1$1$1$2$1$1.class
Executing this script would not remove the wanted files, because bash reads these as argument variables. Hence I have to escape the dollar signs with "\$".
My actual question
I now want to add a sed-Command in the aforementioned pipeline, replacing this dollar sign. As a matter of fact, sed also reads the dollar sign as special character for regular expressions, so obviously I have to escape it as well. But somehow this doesn't work and I could not find an explanation after googling a lot.
Here are some variations I have tried:
echo "Bla$bla" | sed "s/\$/2/g" # Output: Bla2
echo "Bla$bla" | sed 's/$$/2/g' # Output: Bla
echo "Bla$bla" | sed 's/\\$/2/g' # Output: Bla
echo "Bla$bla" | sed 's/@"\$"/2/g' # Output: Bla
echo "Bla$bla" | sed 's/\\\$/2/g' # Output: Bla
The desired output in this example should be "Bla2bla". What am I missing? I am using GNU sed 4.2.2
EDIT
I just realized, that the above example is wrong to begin with - the echo command already interprets the $ as a variable and the following sed doesn't get it anyway... Here a proper example:
test
with the content bla$bla
cat test
gives bla$bla
cat test | sed "s/$/2/g"
gives bla$bla2
cat test | sed "s/\$/2/g"
gives bla$bla2
cat test | sed "s/\\$/2/g"
gives bla2bla
Hence, the last version is the answer. Remember: when testing, first make sure your test is correct, before you question the test object........
In Unix, environment variables begin with a dollar sign, such as $TERM, $PATH, $var or $i. In sed, the dollar sign is used to indicate the last line of the input file, the end of a line (in the LHS), or a literal symbol (in the RHS).
Regular expressions are used by several different Unix commands, including ed, sed, awk, grep, and to a more limited extent, vi.
If a dollar sign ( $ ) is at the end of the entire regular expression, it matches the end of a line. If an entire regular expression is enclosed by a caret and dollar sign ( ^like this$ ), it matches an entire line. So, to match all strings containing just one characters, use " ^.
Escaping Special Characters To tell the shell to ignore the special meaning normally associated with the dollar sign, put a backslash in front of it.
The correct way to escape a dollar sign in regular expressions for sed is double-backslash. Then, for creating the escaped version in the output, we need some additional slashes:
cat filenames.txt | sed "s/\\$/\\\\$/g" > escaped-filenames.txt
Yep, that's four backslashes in a row. This creates the required changes: a filename like bla$1$2.class
would then change to bla\$1\$2.class
.
This I can then insert into the full pipeline:
for i in $(diff -r old new 2>/dev/null | grep "Only in old" | cut -d "/" -f 3- | sed "s/: /\//g" | sed "s/\\$/\\\\$/g"; do echo "rm -f $i" >> REMOVEOLDFILES.sh; done
Alternative to solve the background problem
chepner posted an alternative to solve the backround problem by simply adding single-quotes around the filenames for the output. This way, the $-signs are not read as variables by bash when executing the script and the files are also properly removed:
for i in $(diff -r old new 2>/dev/null | grep "Only in old" | cut -d "/" -f 3- | sed "s/: /\//g"); do echo "rm -f '$i'" >> REMOVEOLDFILES.sh; done
(note the changed echo "rm -f '$i'"
in that line)
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