Using a simple SED script

[Lee nino]

Hi,

I have a file containing names of file I wish to link to a working directory.

I wish to insert ln ./path/path2/ in front of every line of text, and then execute the file to link the files in the list to my working directory.

How do I use a / in the field?

I have tried the following without succes:

sed "s/^/ln ./path1/path2//" file.tmp > file.lnk

Thanks for your help.

[Jean-Luc Oudart]

You have to pretect slash with a backslash

example
echo abc | sed -e 's/^/\/tmp\//'
/tmp/abc

Rgds,
Jean-Luc

[Brian Bergstrand]

You need to escape the / character with a backslash (\).

So all /'s will look like "\/".

HTH.

[curt larson_1]

unlike addresses, which require a slash (/)
as a delimiter, the regular experession can be delimited by any character except a blank or a newline. thus if the pattern contained slashes, you could choose another character, such as an exclamation mark as the delimiter

sed 's!^!ln ./p1/p2/!'

[Umapathy S · Accepted solution]

Lee,
Open vi and execute the below

:%s:^:\./path/path2/:

You can try the same in sed also. Use a different seperator or escape with a backslash \ before the /.

Try this one
sed -e "s:^:ln \./path1/path2/:" file.tmp >file.lnk

HTH,
Umapathy

[John Meissner]

to put a "/" (slash) in your sed script you will need to escape it due to it being a special character. to escape any character you can use a "\" (back slash) so you would use it like so:

cat file | sed 's/^/^\/path1\/path2\//g' > links.txt

cat links.txt |
while read line
do
ln -s $line .
done