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I have a text file containing this:

0 0 -1 0
1 0 0 0
0 -1 0 0
1.5 0.0 1.0 1

and I want to replace the 1.0 to 2.0 so that it becomes:

0 0 -1 0
1 0 0 0
0 -1 0 0
1.5 0.0 2.0 1

so I use this command:

sed -i 's/'1.0'/'2.0'/g' /home/user1/file1.txt

or this:

sed -i 's/1.0/2.0/g' /home/user1/file1.txt

but this is the result that appears and I don't know how to fix this:

0 0 -2.0
2.0 0 0
0 -2.0 0
1.5 0.0 2.0 1
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1 Answer 1

up vote 2 down vote accepted

You need to escape dot in search pattern:

sed -i 's/1\.0/2.0/g' /home/user1/file1.txt
share|improve this answer
    
thanks for the answer! what if 1.0 and 2.0 were saved in variables $i and $j? where i has the value 1.0 and j has the value 2.0 –  Tak Mar 12 at 3:00
    
You should save 1.0 as 1\.0. –  cuonglm Mar 12 at 3:08
    
so is there any simple easy way to do that? because this code is in a loop and this value 1.0 changes from time to time and I don't want to save in the file1.txt as 1\.0 as this will affect the rest of the script. –  Tak Mar 12 at 3:09

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