What do I need to quote in sed command lines?

There are many questions on this site on how to escape various elements for sed, but I'm looking for a more general answer. I understand that I might want to escape some characters to avoid shell expansion:

Bash:

Single quoted [strings] ('') are used to preserve the literal value of each character enclosed within the quotes. [However,] a ~~single quote~~ may not occur between single quotes, even when preceded by a backslash.

The backslash retains its meaning [in double quoted strings] only when followed by dollar, backtick, double quote, backslash or newline. Within double quotes, the backslashes are removed from the input stream when followed by one of these characters. Backslashes preceding characters that don't have a special meaning are left unmodified for processing by the shell interpreter.

sh: (I hope you don't have history expansion)

Single quoted string behaviour: same as bash

Enclosing characters in double quotes preserves the literal value of all characters within the quotes, with the exception of dollar, single quote, backslash, and, when history expansion is enabled, exclamation mark.
The characters dollar and single quote retain their special meaning within double quotes.

The backslash retains its special meaning only when followed by one of the following characters: $, ', ", \, or newline. A double quote may be quoted within double quotes by preceding it with a backslash.

If enabled, history expansion will be performed unless an exclamation mark appearing in double quotes is escaped using a backslash. The backslash preceding the ! is not removed.

...but none of that explains why this stops working as soon as you remove any escaping:

sed -e "s#\(\w\+\) #\1\/#g" #find a sequence of characters in a line
#    why? ↑   ↑ ↑     ↑     #replace the following space with a slash.

None of (, ), / or + (or [, or ]...) seem to have any special meaning that requires them to be escaped in order to work. Hell, even calling the command directly through Python makes sed not work properly, although the manpage doesn't seem to spell out anything about this (not when I search for backslash, anyway.)

$ lvdisplay -C --noheadings -o vg_name,name > test
$ python
>>> import os
>>> #Python requires backslash escaping of \1, even in triple quotes
>>> #lest \1 is read to mean "byte with value 0x01".
>>> output = os.execl("/bin/sed", "-e", "s#(\w+) #\\1/#g", "test")
(Output remains unchanged)
$ python
>>> import os
>>> output = os.execl("/bin/sed", "-e", "s#\(\w\+\) #\\1\/#g", "test")
(Correct output)
$ WHAT THE HELL
Have you tried using jQuery? It's perfect and it does all the things.

Kent

If I understood you right, your problem is not about bash/sh, it is about the regex flavour sed uses by default: BRE.

The other [= anything but dot, star, caret and dollar] BRE metacharacters require a backslash to give them their special meaning. The reason is that the oldest versions of UNIX grep did not support these.

Grouping (..) should be escaped to give it special meaning. same as + otherwise sed will try to match them as they are literal strings/chars. That's why your s#$\w\+$ #...# should be escaped. The replacement part doesn't need escaping, so:

sed 's#\(\w\+\) #\1 /#'

should work.

sed has usually option to use extended regular expressions (now with ?, +, |, (), {m,n}); e.g. GNU sed has -r, then your one-liner could be:

sed -r 's#(\w+) #\1 /#'

I paste some examples here that may help you understand what's going on:

kent$  echo "abcd "|sed 's#\(\w\+\) #\1 /#'
abcd /
kent$  echo "abcd "|sed -r 's#(\w+) #\1 /#'                                                                                                                                 
abcd /
kent$  echo "(abcd+) "|sed 's#(\w*+) #&/#'
(abcd+) /

What you're observing is correct. Certain characters like ?, +, (, ), {, } need to be escaped when using basic regular expressions.

Quoting from the sed manual:

The only difference between basic and extended regular expressions is in the behavior of a few characters: ‘?’, ‘+’, parentheses, and braces (‘{}’). While basic regular expressions require these to be escaped if you want them to behave as special characters, when using extended regular expressions you must escape them if you want them to match a literal character.

(Emphasis mine.) These don't need to be escaped, though, when using extended regexps, except when matching a literal character (as mentioned in the last line quoted above.)

If you want a general answer,

Shell metacharacters need to be quoted or escaped from the shell;
Regex metacharacters need to be escaped if you want a literal interpretation;
Some regex constructs are formed by a backslash escape; depending on context, these backslashes may need quoting.

So you have the following scenarios;

# Match a literal question mark
echo '?' | grep \?
# or equivalently
echo '?' | grep "?"
# or equivalently
echo '?' | grep '?'

# Match a literal asterisk
echo '*' | grep \\\*
# or equivalently
echo '*' | grep "\\*"
# or equivalently
echo '*' | grep '\*'

# Match a backreference: any character repeated twice
echo 'aa' | grep \\\(.\\\)\\1
# or equivalently
echo 'aa' | grep "\(.\)\\1"
# or equivalently
echo 'aa' | grep '\(.\)\1'

As you can see, single quotes probably make the most sense most of the time.

If you are embedding into a language which requires backslash quoting of its own, you have to add yet another set of backslashes, or avoid invoking a shell.

As others have pointed out, extended regular expressions obey a slightly different syntax, but the general pattern is the same. Bottom line, to minimize interference from the shell, use single quotes whenever you can.

For literal characters, you can avoid some backslashitis by using a character class instead.

echo '*' | grep \[\*\]
# or equivalently
echo '*' | grep "[*]"
# or equivalently
echo '*' | grep '[*]'

FreeBSD sed, which is also used on Mac OS X, uses -E instead of -r for extended regular expressions. Therefore, to have it portable, use basic regular expressions. + in extended-regular-expression mode, for example, would have to be replaced with \{1,\} in basic-regular-expression mode. In basic- as well as extended-regular-expression mode, FreeBSD sed does not seem to recognize \w which has to be replaced with [[:alnum:]_] (cf. man re_format).

# using FreeBSD sed (on Mac OS X)

# output: Hello, world!
echo 'hello    world' | sed -e 's/h/H/' -e 's/ \{1,\}/, /g' -e 's/\([[:alnum:]_]\{1,\}\)$/\1!/'
echo 'hello    world' | sed -E -e 's/h/H/' -e 's/ +/, /g' -e 's/([[:alnum:]_]+)$/\1!/'
echo 'hello    world' | sed -E -e 's/h/H/' -e 's/ +/, /g' -e 's/(\w+)$/\1!/'  # does not work

# find a sequence of characters in a line
# replace the following space with a slash
# output: abcd+/abcd+/
echo 'abcd+ abcd+ ' > test
python
import os
output = os.execl('/usr/bin/sed', '-e', 's#\([[:alnum:]_+]\{1,\}\) #\\1/#g', 'test')

To use a single quote as part of a sed regular expression while keeping your outer single quotes for the sed regular expression, you can concatenate three separate strings each enclosed in single quotes to avoid possible shell expansion.

# man bash:
# "A single quote may not occur between single quotes, even when preceded by a backslash."
# cf. http://stackoverflow.com/a/9114512 & http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/82757
# concatenate: 's/doesn'  +  \'  +  't/does not/'
echo "sed doesn't work for me" | sed -e 's/doesn'\''t/does not/'

来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18759459/what-do-i-need-to-quote-in-sed-command-lines

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