I want to use sed to replace each occurence of a particular text in a full source file tree. I've attempted the following:
$ grep -rlI name2port\(\"Wan1\"\) . --exclude-dir=.svn --exclude=*.vxs | xargs sed -i 's/name2port\(\"Wan1\"\)/T_PORT_ID_WAN1/g' but it doesn't seem to work, I think my sed cmd isn't correct.
How do I do this?
The problem is, that the replacements just do not happen.
I tried this: $ sed -i 's/name2port\(\"Wan1\"\)/T_PORT_ID_WAN1/g' ./rtos_core/jpax_switch/api/src/nms/switch_l3_route.c but turns out, the occurences of name2port("Wan1") would not be replaced.
sed uses BREs (basic regular expressions) by default, which, for historical reasons - and surprisingly for someone used to modern regular expressions - require escaping of certain metacharacters in order to be recognized as such.
In BREs, ( and ) are ordinary (literal) characters, and only become special when \-escaped.
Therefore, to match literal name2port("Wan1"), use that literal as-is in a BRE (given that you also don't need to \-escape " instances):
sed -i 's/name2port("Wan1")/T_PORT_ID_WAN1/g' ./rtos_core/jpax_switch/api/src/nms/switch_l3_route.c
If you're not concerned about portability, you can use -r (or -E for limited portability to macOS, though with -i that won't work), which then enables EREs (extended regular expressions), whose syntax and features are more likely to work as you expect:
sed -r -i 's/name2port\("Wan1"\)/T_PORT_ID_WAN1/g' ./rtos_core/jpax_switch/api/src/nms/switch_l3_route.c
Note how literals ( and ) now do need to be \-escaped, lest they be interpreted as enclosing a capture group.
In this particular case, it is the BRE that requires less escaping than the ERE; generally, though, it is the opposite.