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Kalib Zen
Asked: 2020-05-15 05:11:47 +0800 CST

Using sed command to replace config file with comment in linux terminal

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I know a little about sed. In /etc/nanorc I got bunch of settings with comments (eg:).

#bind ^K setting 1
#bind ^F whereis all
#bind ^J setting 3

So, I want to comment out only this setting to enable key CTRL+D in nano:

#bind ^F whereis all

I tried this but seems it doesn't work:

sed -ri "s/#bind ^F whereis all.*$/\bind ^F whereis all/" /etc/nanorc

Seriously, I don't know how to go with this.

sed

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Commenting out one line is much easier with a simple text editor, but regardless...

    Your command doesn't work because ^ is a special regexp character, meaning "start of the line" (when not between [ and ]). So your regexp will never match, because you expect the start of the line to be in the middle of the line. Also, you escape the b character in the replacement, which is not needed. Use this instead:

    sed -ri "s/#bind \\^F whereis all.*$/bind ^F whereis all/" /etc/nanorc
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