What I'm trying to do is pretty simple. Getting it to work is turning out not to be. What I want to do is call a bash script with a couple of arguments, and, within the script, call sed to use those args to replace two placeholders in a file:
bashscript SUB1 SUB2 This line inside bashscript doesn't work: sed -e 's/PLACEHOLDER1/$1/' -e 's/PLACEHOLDER2/$2/' < input > output It doesn't work because the command line args ($1, $2) are quoted and don't get replaced. However, because I'm using the -e argument to sed, I have to quote the argument or sed gets all huffy. I've tried all sorts of variations on the quoting and either bash or sed isn't happy no matter what I do. The only workaround I've found is to do the substitutions in two passes: sed s/SUB1/$1/ < input > temp sed s/SUB2/$2/ < temp > output Since I'm not using multiple argument to sed, I don't have to quote the arg. That's an ugly hack and really rubs me the wrong way, however, and it'll get really ugly if I end up having to do more than two substitutions, which I expect to do at a later date. I suppose I could pipe one sed command to another rather than using a temp file but that's not significantly more palatable. Any ideas on a cleaner approach on how to do this, either by getting this right or using an alternative method, are welcome. One thing to note is that this is a small part of a larger, more complex script, so the bash script can't (easily) go away. I don't have to use sed to do the replacement if there's another approach from within the bash script that would work. -- "Americans detest all lies except lies spoken in public or printed lies." - Edgar Watson Howe -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/201004162015.38878.ddjo...@riddlemaster.org
