Update var in ini file using bash

Question

I am attempting to write a bash script to configure various aspects of a server. The context here is replacing a value of a variable in a conf file (ini format) with another

Answer 1

Assuming your format is that there are no square-bracket lines (like [ssh-iptables]) within sections, I would use your solution above (with sed) but restrict the query to within that block like so:

sed -i '/^\[ssh-iptables\]$/,/^\[/ s/^enabled = false/enabled = true/' /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf

The extra part at the beginning tells the following substitution statement to only run between the line that is [ssh-iptables] and the next one that starts with a [. It uses two regular expressions separated by a comma which indicate the bounds.