Replace serial in zone files with sed

Question

I need to replace the serials in my zone files, and I thought the easiest would be to use sed to change this. I have the following line to test.

@ IN SOA    ns1.domain.com. webdev.domain.com. (
        2006080401  ; serial
        8H      ; refresh
        2H      ; retry
        1W      ; expire
        4h)     ; minimum ttl

        NS  ns1.domain.com.
        NS  ns2.domain.com.
        MX 10   mail1.domain.com.
        MX 20   mail2.domain.com.

domain.com.      A   255.255.255.255
mail1           A   255.255.255.255
mail2           A   10.10.10.10

www         CNAME   domain.com.
ftp         CNAME   www
webmail     CNAME   www

The regular expression I've created using http://rubular.com/ is the following. On rebular it the regex I got matches only one line.

\s*[0-9]\s;\s*serial

So in sed I would use this as follows.

sed -i 's/\s*[0-9]\s;\s*serial/20091218 ; serial/g' *.zone

My problem is that this doesn't change anything in the file. I've tried several things already. Thx for your help

Answer 1

It looks like you need an asterisk after the second "\s"

sed -i 's/\s*[0-9]\s*;\s*serial/20091218 ; serial/' *.zone

And it might not hurt to put a couple more things in there as well:

sed -i 's/^\s*[0-9]\s*;\s*serial\s$/20091218 ; serial/' *.zone

I took out the "g" since you probably won't have multiple occurrences on one line.

Answer 2

Your sed pattern looks for exactly one digit. This works for me:

sed -i 's/\s*[0-9]\+\s;\s*serial/20091218 ; serial/g' *.zone && cat *.zone