I'm trying to output my $PATH in the command line, but also replace the : with \n using the following:
echo $PATH | sed s/:/\n/g
This doesn't work 100%, how to I get it working?
asked Mar 7, 2013 at 10:06
2 Answers
You need to escape the backslash, i.e.
echo $PATH | sed s/:/\\n/g
Or, as BatchyX noted
echo $PATH | tr ':' '\n'
Another possibility, if you want to parse $PATH, you can also use
IFS=:
for i in $PATH; do
echo $i
done
Here IFS=: tells bash to split strings at :. Please note, that this will alter other things in the current session, too. Excerpt from man bash:
IFS The Internal Field Separator that is used for word splitting after expansion and to split lines into words with the read builtin command. The default value is
<space><tab><newline>
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@pratnala: Don't think so... I tested the command successfully in bash and zsh.– mpyMar 7, 2013 at 10:25
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When I run your first example in the cmd line, the colons are replaced, but with a literal \n, so my path isn't getting split to newlines at the colons. Mar 7, 2013 at 10:34
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1@mpy I don't think you have to escape the backslash because
\nas a whole represents the return character, isn't it? Escaping the backslash makes '\' and 'n' two separate characters– pratnalaMar 7, 2013 at 10:52 -
1You need to escape the
\because the sed pattern is not quoted. A more robust method would be @user1936123 answer below.– terdonMar 7, 2013 at 11:12
You could also quote the regular expression:
echo $PATH | sed 's/:/\n/g'
For your \n literals, you could use echo -e.
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@josef.van.niekerk: Does that command work for you? (I would assume it's identical to my first one -- \n gets passed directly to sed)– mpyMar 7, 2013 at 11:14
sed? doesn'ttr ':' '\n'work ?echo "$PATH" | sed 's/:/\n/g'echo "${PATH//:/$'\n'}"