How to use sed to replace a config file's variable?

Question

I've been looking online for this answer and cannot seem to find it.

I have a config file that contains:

VAR1=VALUE1
VAR2=VALUE2
VAR3=VALUE3
VAR4=VALUE4
VAR5=VALUE5
VAR6=VALUE6

And I want to change VAR5's value from VALUE5 to VALUE10. Unfortunately, I do not know the value of VALUE5 so I cannot search for it. So basically I need to use sed (or whatever) to replace the value of VAR5 to another value.

Answer 1

You can try this sed:

sed -i.bak 's/^\(VAR5=\).*/\1VALUE10/' file

It gives:

VAR1=VALUE1
VAR2=VALUE2
VAR3=VALUE3
VAR4=VALUE4
VAR5=VALUE10
VAR6=VALUE6

Answer 2

Even though the answer has been added to the question. I spent some time on how it works, I would like add some facts and my version of the answer,

sed -i 's,^\(THISISMYVARIABLE[ ]*=\).*,\1'THISISMYVALUE',g' config.cfg

Explanation:

• As a basic of sed 's/find_this/replace_with/', we are saying sed to search and replace. Also remember there are multiple other delimiters that we can use instead of /. Here , is used.
• Here we find the line that matches ^\(THISISMYVARIABLE[ ]*=\).* . This means we are grouping the match THISISMYVARIABLE[ ]*= . ([ ]* to cover if there are any spaces after the key)
• In replace section \1 is a back-reference. We are referencing the first group in the regular expression that we used for match.