sed to update xml file

Question

I want to update

<MySettingsSettings enabled="false" logFilePath="E:\server.log" />

to

<MySettingsSettings enabled="true" logFilePath="D:\server.log" />

How can I do this through sed? or is there any other way to update in a windows server?

Answer 1

My suggestion, is that you use a real programming language that can actually parse and update XML/HTML documents properly. Using sed to update XML/HTML will probably fail in the long run.

Answer 2

A simple substitution from your example can be done like this:

sed -e 's/enabled="true"/enabled="false"/g' -e 's/logFilePath="D:/logFilePath="C:/g' myfile.xml

However, I would agree with Zoredache's warning that unless you are only doing a very simple string replacement inside XML, you'd be better off with a language that has libraries available specifically built for parsing XML.

A great resource for a multitude of handy sed commands is the "sed one-liner" file:

http://sed.sourceforge.net/sed1line.txt