I have some multiple gnuplot files, and I wish to find and replace "set xrange [0:20]" to "set xrange [0:3]" for series of files of "gnuplot_RTre_*.gnplt" in current directory. I found how to swap specific strings from all files from folder, but not only for specific files including special characters.
So I tried
find . -type f -name "gnuplot_RTre_*.gnplt" -exec sed -i 's/set xrange [0:20]/set xrange [0:3]/g' {} +
It doesn't make an error, but it swaps nothing from those files. So I tried to escape special characters using backslash
find . -type f -name "gnuplot_RTre_*.gnplt" -exec sed -i 's/set xrange \\[\\0\\:\\20\\]\\/set xrange \\[\\0\\:\\3\\]\\/g' {} +
Still not working, no error, but no swapping.
I also tried
grep -rl 'set xrange [0:20]' ./ | xargs sed -i 's/set xrange [0:20]/set xrange [0:3]/g' gnuplot_RTre_*.gnplt
But it is not working as well.
I think my commands are wrong with special character escaping or file selection, but not sure how to solve this issue. Need some helps.
Thank you
You have extra backslashes to escape special characters. Please try:
# find . -type f -name "gnuplot_RTre_*.gnplt" -exec sed -i 's/set xrange \[0:20]/set xrange \[0:3]/g' {} +
# The backslash in the REPLACEMENT above is unnecessary, although harmless.
# Please adopt the following instead.
find . -type f -name "gnuplot_RTre_*.gnplt" -exec sed -i 's/set xrange \[0:20]/set xrange [0:3]/g' {} +
In sed, the characters $.*[\^ need to be escaped with a backslash to be treated as literal.
[EDIT]
The right square bracket "]" is usually not a special character in regex and
you do not have to esacape it:
echo "[abc]" | sed 's/]/*/g'
=> [abc*
But "]" behaves as a metacharacter if preceded by an unescaped left square bracket "[" to compose a character class.
echo "[abc]abc" | sed 's/[abc]/*/g'
=> [***]***
In order to make "[" to be literal, we need to escape it.
echo "[abc]abc" | sed 's/\[abc]/*/g'
=> *abc
"]" can be also escaped just for visual symmetricity.
echo "[abc]abc" | sed 's/\[abc\]/*/g'
=> *abc