How can I handle forward slash character within a bash script?

In a package.json, I’m trying to replace that:

  "main": "lib/index.js",
  "types": "lib/index.d.ts",

By that :

 "main": "./index.js",
 "types": "./index.d.ts",

So I wrote a simple script that replaces the string pattern by a dot, like so:

sed 's/lib\//.\//g' package.json

It works when I type it in the terminal.

But when it doesn’t run properly when inserted in a package.json script.

package.json:

"build": "tsc && cp package.json lib/ && cd lib && sed 's/lib\//.\//g' package.json && npm publish ./lib"

Output:

 sed: 1: "s/lib//.//g": bad flag in substitute command: '.'

It keeps replacing the escaping backslash by forward slash.

How can I make it work ?

>Solution :

You make changes to a json document and \ has special meaning in json. It’s an escape character there too. You therefore need to escape your escape character:

s/lib\\//.\\//g

or give the json parser the unicode value for backslash:

s/lib\u005c//.\u005c//g

or simpler, don’t use a forward slash as the delimiter in sed when it’s one of the characters that you want to match on:

sed 's,lib/,./,g'

Note that you are not actually modifying the document. To do that, add the sed option -i.

sed -i 's,lib/,./,g' package.json