sed single quotes

Question

I've been banging into escaping single quote's problem using SED (Bash shell).

I need to make

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = '';

into

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = 'mypassword';

What I've tried is:

sed -i "s/$cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = '';/$cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = '$rootpassword';/g" /usr/share/phpmyadmin/libraries/config.default.bak

Which ends up really jumbling the line.

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['password['Servers'][]['passsword'] = 'mypassword'

I've tried the '\'' to escape single quotes and I think everything else under the sun but just can't get it quite there.

can anyone point to my probable obvious mistake?

Thank you.

Answer 1

instead of escaping, you can use \x27 for single quote. this works not only for sed, for awk etc. as well.

see test:

kent$  cat tt
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = ''

kent$  sed -r 's/(\$cfg\[\x27Servers\x27\]\[\$i\]\[\x27password\x27\] \= \x27)\x27/\1mypassword\x27/g' tt
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = 'mypassword'

note that, the sed line may not be the best solution for your problem, e.g. put the whole string to "s/../" may not be necessary. However, I just want to show how the \x27 worked.

Answer 2

$ sed -i "s/\$cfg\['Servers'\]\[\$i\]\['password'\] = '';/\$cfg['Servers'][\$i]['password'] = '\$rootpassword';/g" file