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Comments on Substituting text in a sed like manner but with a richer format

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Substituting text in a sed like manner but with a richer format

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I have the following problems working with sed:

  • It doesn't allow multiline operations (thus, no indentations, no nesting)
  • It is generally obligatory to wrap entire commands in quote marks (sed "SED_COMMAND" FILE) even if the command itself contains quote marks.

Without these problems I could format a long liner such as sed -i "s/\$to = ".*";$/\$to = example@example.com;/g" PATH as in this pseudocode:

sed -i
    A
        \$to = ".*";$
    B
        \$to = example@example.com;
    G
PATH
  • A means "from"
  • B means "to"
  • G means "global"

Since sed doesn't work this way, how could I achieve a similar syntax in the shell? Perhaps by using Python? Perl? Something else?

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1 comment thread

Point 2 is moot: You can put the Sed script in a file and then the shell doesn't get in your way, all... (4 comments)
Point 2 is moot: You can put the Sed script in a file and then the shell doesn't get in your way, all...
Quasímodo‭ wrote about 3 years ago

Point 2 is moot: You can put the Sed script in a file and then the shell doesn't get in your way, all quotes are literal. Can you clarify point 1? Sed does allow multi-line scripts and can even do multi-line operations.

Canina‭ wrote about 3 years ago

More generally, point 2 is about the shell, not about sed, so any other tool that takes a similar expression as a command line argument would require similar quoting (or other handling) of that expression. It seems to me that this question simply seeks a way to split a sed expression onto multiple lines.

deleted user wrote about 3 years ago

Quasímodo‭ I meant to a full multiline sed command but also with nesting, pretty much like in the pseudocode.

Canina‭ wrote about 3 years ago

deleted user I see no evidence of nesting in the pseudocode in this question. Indentation, yes, but not nesting.