I am trying to find a way to escape the dollar sign within the sed command in a bash script. I have found here tons of answers that say that you need to put four backslashes in a row in order to escape the sign. I have also tried the version with two backslashes, but for some reason, I can’t get it to work. Can someone please tell me what I’m doing wrong?
Let’s say that you have a file called aaa.txt located in /home/Documents. The file has just only one line of text, which says aaa. I am trying to replace it using this command (please don’t tell me that I can reference it in a different way than with line numbers because this is just a reduced example of something else I am doing):
sed -i "1ccd /home/userr/$PARAMETER/$METHOD" "/home/userr/Documents/aaa.txt"
The output that I get is this:
cd /home/userr/\/\
Which is not what I want. I want to have exactly this output, with dollar signs in the string:
cd /home/userr/$PARAMETER/$METHOD
What is the proper form of the string passed to the sed command to achieve this?
>Solution :
You can escape the dollar sign with a backslash:
sed -i "1ccd /home/userr/\$PARAMETER/\$METHOD" "/home/userr/Documents/aaa.txt"
Documentation here: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Escape-Character.html