Escape brackets when using SED

Question

I would like to replace the value varchar(36) with char(36) in a file by using sed. I am trying with

sed -i ’s/varchar(36)/char(6)/g’ calls_contacts.sql

But the command does not execute. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

I guess what you want to do is:

sed -i 's/varchar(36)/char(36)/gi' calls_contacts.sql

I corrected 3 things:

• Closed the '
• Replaced the second -iwith gi. I suppose you want to ingore case and be global.
• I unescaped the parenthesis ( as they don't need escaping (must not be escaped) in normal mode.