Re: OT: sed help

[Ben Goren <ben@trumpetpower.com>]

On Tue, Jun 04, 2002 at 03:17:18PM -0700, James A. Peltier wrote:

> sorry for this OT question regarding sed.
>
> I'm trying  to take command line  user input and pipe  it to sed
> for parsing. currently i have this
>
> [joshua:] vi test
> #!/bin/sh
> VALUE1=$1
> VALUE2=$2
>
> echo $VALUE1 $VALUE2 > text.tmp
> sed 's/$VALUE1/$VALUE2/' text.tmp > textfile
>
> for some reason this doesn't work when I try
>
> [joshua:] sh test test1 test2
>
> any ideas  why?  I'm certainly  no sed  expert as many  can see.
> What would be the easiest way to implement this?

You're using the worng quotes. Variable interpolation only happens
with double quotes, not single. Compare:

    $ FOO=bar
    $ echo $FOO
    bar
    $ echo "FOO is $FOO"
    FOO is bar
    $ echo 'FOO is $FOO'
    FOO is $FOO
    $

And, yes, there are much better places to ask these questions. You
might start with:

    http://www.trumpetpower.com/OpenBSD/Meta-FAQ#basic_unix

You  should also  read sh  (1)--this  is pretty  basic stuff,  all
covered  in  the  man  page  and  any  other  (Bourn-style)  shell
programming reference.

b&

--
Ben Goren
 mailto:ben@trumpetpower.com
 http://www.trumpetpower.com/
 icbm:33o25'37"N_111o57'32"W

[demime 0.98d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]