Substitution of ! with sed leads to event not found

Question

I need to change every occurrence of ! to : as field separators in a group file.

sed 's/!/:/g' filename > newfilename 

But I get the error /: Event not found?

Answer 1

You are using csh so the ! is being interpreted to fix this escape the ! or just use bash:

sed 's/\!/:/g' file > outfile

With csh the ! used for command history reference and it works even inside a pair of apostrophes ' or quotation marks ", unless escaped with a backslash \.