There are the Rich's sh (POSIX shell) tricks. And now we have Nixers' sh tricks.

Replacing A with B in text

As simple as it may sound, there is not a lot of ways to do this, as quite every tool is oriented toward regexes. There is no -F flag in sed!

The only two ways I know is through parameter expansion and sed:

- Parameter expansion


Quite a bit complex! As I am aware of, the quotes expansion occurs it 2 context: while executing commands (so required in printf '%s\n' "$text") and in parameter extensions (so required in the ugly ${text%%"$change"*}).

- Sed <3

I can't remember where I did see that (link to the source appreciated), but it is a lot simpler than what I saw.


This is quite as lengthy, but less black magic is involved: put every character from the pattern in its own character class:

change became [[][t][e][x][t][]]
Therefore, even the '[' and ']' are interpreted as plain characters an not as part of a regex.