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July 28, 2011
I recently had a colleague ask me how to do in-line regular expression matching for a Bash shell script. Since
Bash v3 only offers a regex matching check and not
the full s/foo/bar/ regex syntax, I offered to look into other alternatives.
My natural instinct was to look for a Perl cmdline regex parser, which works great if you’re manipulating a file and not shell variables.
In the end, since he only needed a simple search and replace, and not an actual regular express, this sufficed:
#!/bin/bash
VAR1="foobar"
VAR2=`echo $VAR1 | awk -v srch="foo" -v repl="bar" '{ sub(srch,repl,$0); print $0 }'`
echo $VAR1
echo $VAR2
image credit: https://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/bash/bashtop.html