I am trying to replace backslashes in Windows paths so that I can paste the path in Filezilla to open the folder without having to browser in the directory structure. I use the following command:
echo '\path\to\the\05_directory' | sed -e 's/\\/\//g'
My expected result is
/path/to/the/05_directory
but instead I get
/path o he_directory
it seems \t and \05 are interpreted as something other than literal strings.
Why does this happen? How can I work this around?
You can use printf "%q" to print the literal \ vs having them interpreted as tabs:
printf "%q" '\path\to\the\05_directory'
\\path\\to\\the\\05_directory
Then you can use sed to get your output:
printf "%q" '\path\to\the\05_directory' | sed -e 's|\\\\|/|g'
/path/to/the/05_directory
The "%q" field prepares a string to be used in the shell. That of course means that ' ' will be escaped:
printf "%q" '\path\to\the\05 directory'
\\path\\to\\the\\05\ directory
Which you can clean up separately:
printf "%q" '\path\to\the\05 directory' | sed -e 's|\\\\|/|g; s|\\||g'
/path/to/the/05 directory