I want to escape a DOS filename so I can use it with sed. I have a DOS batch file something like this:
set FILENAME=%~f1
sed 's/Some Pattern/%FILENAME%/' inputfile
(Note: %~f1
- expands %1
to a Fully qualified path name - C:\utils\MyFile.txt
)
I found that the backslashes in %FILENAME%
are just escaping the next letter.
How can I double them up so that they are escaped?
(I have cygwin installed so feel free to use any other *nix commands)
Combining Jeremy and Alexandru Nedelcu's suggestions, and using | for the delimiter in the sed command I have
set FILENAME=%~f1
cygpath "s|Some Pattern|%FILENAME%|" >sedcmd.tmp
sed -f sedcmd.tmp inputfile
del /q sedcmd.tmp
This will work. It's messy because in BAT files you can't use set var=`cmd` like you can in unix.
The fact that echo doesn't understand quotes is also messy, and could lead to trouble if Some Pattern
contains shell meta characters.
set FILENAME=%~f1
echo s/Some Pattern/%FILENAME%/ | sed -e "s/\\/\\\\/g" >sedcmd.tmp
sed -f sedcmd.tmp inputfile
del /q sedcmd.tmp
[Edited]: I am suprised that it didn't work for you. I just tested it, and it worked on my machine. I am using sed from http://sourceforge.net/projects/unxutils and using cmd.exe to run those commands in a bat file.