Sed is crushing me

Hi All...
Okk, I'll do my best to explain my little mess... !

We are coding in bash, but we have to interact with an "ugly-old-style" windoze .ini file.

Suppose we have a file named cdkeys.ini, whose contents look like this:

Code:

---


[PRODUCT]
CDKey = "ABCD1234"

---

Please note that the double quotes around ABCD1234 are important to us.

Now, suppose we want to change the CDKey... I tried what follows:

Code:

---


#!/bin/bash
CDKEY="NEWCDKEY"
sed -i s/CDKey.*/CDKey\ =\ \"$CDKEY\"/ cdkeys.ini

---

Which, I belive, should look for any line with "CDKey" inside, and replace the whole line with CDKey = "NEWCDKEY".

Actually it doesn't work... it does target the correct line, but all I get is this crap:

Code:

---

"DKey = "NEWCDKEY

---

probably I'm missing something important with the use of sed or regexp or shell expansion... but I noticed a couple things. it works almost good if we remove the \" and \" in the replacement string:

Code:

---


#!/bin/bash
CDKEY="NEWCDKEY"
sed -i s/CDKey.*/CDKey\ =\ $CDKEY/ cdkeys.ini

---

leads to

Code:

---

CDKey = NEWCDKEY

---

it also works well if we remove the $CDKEY variable, or replace it with a simple literal like BYEBYE.... so, for example

Code:

---


sed -i s/CDKey.*/CDKey\ =\ \"BYEBYE\"/ cdkeys.ini

---

will output

Code:

---

CDKey = "BYEBYE"

---

which would be perfect if only we'd use a variable!

AnyOne Knows???

Thank you for your attention!

I am a noob in linux ... but I guess I see where the problem is ...
still don't know what to do against is.
It seems that in the string of $CDKEY is the symbol for "back to start of line"
so sed is doing so and writes the second " at the beginning of the line.

Since I don't know how to look into this in detail my tip is to try using a different editor to look at the shell ...

Thanks for your reply

Uhmmm, yes, I am suspicious about that $ as well...
I looked for an alternate way to expand a variable, but I couldn't find one... the $ is always there... while waiting for illumination, I'm coding an ugly workaround...

Uhm, different editor? as far as I know bash is always bash, no matter if I code in gedit or another one... or you have been misunderstood :)

Hope someone nooooose...

EDIT: Yeeees!!! my mess, you are right.

the big problem was not sed or the shell... it was the .ini file to be crippled!
I thought my ini files were converted from the windows format to the unix format (the cr/lf and unicode stuff...) but I was wrong since a cleanup function was restoring the crippled version...

opening the .ini files in mc shown that clearly!

Before I forget... how do I mark a thread "solved" ???
for this and future times....

NEWKEY="0123456789"
sed -i s"/^CDKey.*/CDKEY = \"${NEWKEY}\"/" cdkeys.ini

Above codes worked, the difference is ' and ".

Have a nice day.

Oh Thanx, I see...
I am unsure... I mean I don't know sed and regexp that much... I'll get into it after work, so I will be sure too!

Thanks Again in the meanwhile!