Sed in Bash Difficult pattern

Question

I have a complicated string that I need to search for and replace

I need to replace:

common.loader=${catalina.base}/lib,${catalina.base}/lib/*.jar,${catalina.home}/lib,${catalina.home}/lib/*.jar,/var/lib/tomcat6/common/classes,/var/lib/tomcat6/common/*.jar

With

#common.loader=${catalina.base}/lib,${catalina.base}/lib/*.jar,${catalina.home}/lib,${catalina.home}/lib/*.jar,/var/lib/tomcat6/common/classes,/var/lib/tomcat6/common/*.jar
common.loader=${catalina.base}/lib,${catalina.base}/lib/*.jar,${catalina.home}/lib,${catalina.home}/lib/*.jar,/var/lib/tomcat6/common/classes,/var/lib/tomcat6/common/*.jar,${catalina.home}/lib/ext,${catalina.home}/lib/ext/*.jar

I'm afraid that I can't use python or any other scripting language (my bash script is currently 100+ lines)

So far I have a test file that contains the string in question and I am trying to use this sed command:

#!/bin/sh
sed -i 's:common.loader=${catalina.base}/lib,${catalina.base}/lib/*.jar,${catalina.home}/lib,${catalina.home}/lib/*.jar,/var/lib/tomcat6/common/classes,/var/lib/tomcat6/common/*.jar:#common.loader=${catalina.base}/lib,${catalina.base}/lib/*.jar,${catalina.home}/lib,${catalina.home}/lib/*.jar,/var/lib/tomcat6/common/classes,/var/lib/tomcat6/common/*.jar\ncommon.loader=${catalina.base}/lib,${catalina.base}/lib/*.jar,${catalina.home}/lib,${catalina.home}/lib/*.jar,/var/lib/tomcat6/common/classes,/var/lib/tomcat6/common/*.jar,${catalina.home}/lib/ext,${catalina.home}/lib/ext/*.jar:' workers.properties

No errors are thrown, but nothing gets replaced either. Do I need to escape certain characters inside the string?

Any advice would help, thanks!

UPDATE: The command I used was similar to Joe's:

sed -i -e 's:^\(common.loader=${catalina.base}/lib,${catalina.base}/lib/\*\.jar,${catalina.home}/lib,${catalina.home}/lib/\*\.jar,/var/lib/tomcat6/common/classes,/var/lib/tomcat6/common/\*\.jar$\):#\1\n\1,${catalina.home}/lib/ext,${catalina.home}/lib/ext/*.jar:' /etc/tomcat6/catalina.properties

Answer 1

You need to escape the '*' for it to work, you will probably want to escape the '.' for a more accurate match, the period will match any character, and the asterisk with match between any number of characters.

This will do the match you need:

sed -e 's:^\(common.loader=${catalina.base}/lib,${catalina.base}/lib/\*\.jar,${catalina.home}/lib,${catalina.home}/lib/\*\.jar,/var/lib/tomcat6/common/classes,/var/lib/tomcat6/common/\*\.jar$\):#\1,${catalina.home}/lib/ext,${catalina.home}/lib/ext/*.jar:' workers.properties

I escaped each meta-character (. and *) added anchors (^ and $) and used a back-reference with ( and ) so the old part of the pattern could be resused.

This is a decent guide to sed: http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sed.html

Answer 2

This will do it - create a file with the following sed commands in e.g. sed.script

    /^common\.loader/ {
        s|^common|#common|
    a common.loader=${catalina.base}/lib,${catalina.base}/lib/*.jar,${catalina.home}    /lib,${catalina.home}/lib/*.jar,/var/lib/tomcat6/common/classes,/var/lib/tomcat6/common/*.jar,${catalina.home}/lib/ext,${catalina.home}/lib/ext/*.jar
}

then use it like this

sed -i -f sed.script filetoedit

you may want to make a copy of the file so you can call it like so

sed -i.bak -f sed.script filetoedit