Issue with sed

[dhina]

Hi all,
I want to edit a .conf file on the fly, so I have decided to use sed.
The line in focus looks like this

server 127.127.25.0 minpoll 1

in which I have to replace last 1 with 7 Henceforth sed may be used as

sed -ie 's/^server\(*\)[[:digit:]]/\17/'

which means
i) search for a line starting with "server"
ii) target the last digit
iii) replace the target with 7
for which I'm expecting an output like

server 127.127.25.0 minpoll 7

but what I get is

 127.127.25.0 minpoll 7

can someone help me in this issue

[birdman]

You need to put some escaped brackets around server and then output \1\2 before the number 7 (or you could just rewrite server in the replacement field). \1 only refers to what is inside the first set of escaped brackets so does not include server. This is what works on mine:

sed -ie "s/^\(server\)\(.*\)[0-9]/\1\27/" test.conf

Regards

[dhina]

Thanks Birdman
It does work. Is there any system call that can replace this sed, instead calling sed from system().

[ghostdog74]

awk '/^server/{$NF=7}1'

[birdman]

What language are you writing in?

I don't know of any that model sed to allow you to do it as elegantly but post back and someone might be able to help.