Is there anything better (smarter) than sed?

[rado84]

This sed is seriously beginning to crawl on my nerves and IDK how long it will take before I kick it in its back out of my OS!
I have this universal file Saves_trick.txt which I copy inside each game's main dir which then I edit manually to create a link to the original saves dir. But I wanna save me the trouble of editing it for every game, so I thought I could make sed replace the string with brackets with the current directory name, thus making the Saves_trick file universal. For instance, the universal file contents looks like this:

ln -sTv /B/GAMES/[GAME_NAME]/MainSaves /home/rado/Документи/

So, for instance, I open terminal in NFS MW directory: [rado@arch]: /B/GAMES/NFSMW>$, then I run a script which copies the Saves_trick.txt to the same directory (cp Saves_trick.txt ./).
I tried using sed to replace the [GAME_NAME] string with the cirrent directory name:

sed -i 's/[GAME_NAME]/.//g' file.txt

but instead of replacing [GAME_NAME] with NFSMW, sed replaces everything else AROUND [GAME_NAME] with "./", leaving [GAME_NAME] untouched! So not only it doesn't use the current dir name to replace [GAME_NAME] but instead it replaces all characters of the path with "./"! MEaning that both paths become /.//.//[GAME_NAME]/./ /.//.//.//
I've never seen a dumber program than that!

 

[Diputs]

But why do you use the square brackets, just leave them out so that GAME_NAME is a literal word

 

[Vimmer]

If your frustration is that you don't want to do it yourself, then i think bash scripts could help you out. You can put sed commands (or awk, perl, python, perl, the alternative text manipulation languages) into a bash script. Also, cronjob is specifically used to automate tasks.

As far as the issue you have with the text you are replacing: it seems like you are using the program totally incorrectly. In the sed command in question, you are using the "g" flag and the "-i" option. If the result is making you mad, then please stop using the "-i" option because this irreversably changes your file(s), and since you are using the g flag, then it fu*ks up every instance of your proposed change instead of just the first time it encounters it on the line. If you run it without "-i", then it will only print the result of your changes on the terminal.

but instead of replacing [GAME_NAME] with NFSMW, sed replaces everything else AROUND [GAME_NAME] with "./", leaving [GAME_NAME] untouched! So not only it doesn't use the current dir name to replace [GAME_NAME] but instead it replaces all characters of the path with "./"! MEaning that both paths become /.//.//[GAME_NAME]/./ /.//.//.//
I've never seen a dumber program than that!

With that code above, then everything in your "[GAME NAME]" regular expression will be replace with ".". I hope you understand that "[]" and "." are both regular expressions when you use it as the text you are trying to change. Sed is basically a programming language, so please use it as a text editor with a lot more caution.

 

[rado84]

Yeah, removing the brackets fixed the thing.
Now the only thing that remains is to find what to type in before the /g, so that sed replaces GAME_NAME with the current directory name. For instance, if I run this command in /B/123, GAME_NAME to be replaced with "123" (without the quotes, of course).
But Google and the duck are silent when it comes to sed and current directory name.