Re: Suggest new fixed flag for s command?

very good idea.

to not escape strings by hand, you can use preprocessing, something like:

echo 'jj*hh.?' | sed 's|[.?*]|\\&|g'

On 05/08/2013 11:27 AM, Daniel wrote:
> I have run into a situation sometimes where literal strings I want to replace that have metacharacters, and I want to replace it with some other similarly odd string.
>
> For example, suppose I want to replace the literal string "jj*hh" with the literal string "foo\1bar".
>
> To make it work, I would have to use escape characters:
>
> $ echo 'jj*hh' | sed 's/jj\*hh/foo\\1bar/'
> foo\1bar
>
> I don't mind doing this for one or two strings, but sometimes I have a lot of strings, and don't want to escape them all by hand or write some complex script procedure.
>
> What if the s command could have a f "fixed" flag, similar to the grep -F fixed flag, so the following would work:
>
> $ echo 'jj*hh' | sed 's/jj*hh/foo\1bar/f'
> foo\1bar
>
> The f flag would tell s to ignore all metacharacters, to just interpret A and B in s/A/B/f as fixed strings.
>
> Maybe there is some simpler way to do this I am overlooking? Anyway, just a suggestion.
>
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