How to use verbatim strings in sed?

You should escape the special characters and use a separator other than "/".

sed 's#string1#string2#'

See this SOq:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/407523/escape-a-string-for-sed-search-pattern

This answer on the above:

• https://stackoverflow.com/a/407649/438544

is something you need, except you'd do it in the first, not second part of s/first/second/.

As you are using both ' and " in your sed commands, you'll have to escape some of it. Try doing this - make two files:

1.sed

s_"a\\c:ti]\\']x""/\\//:`~\$%#\^&"'_ _g

2.txt

"a\c:ti]\']x""/\//:`~$%#^&"'hello world m"a\c:ti]\']x""/\//:`~$%#^&"'
"a\c:ti]\']x""/\//:`~$%#^&"'this is working"a\c:ti]\']x""/\//:`~$%#^&"'
"a\c:ti]\']x""/\//:`~$%#^&"'as expected"a\c:ti]\']x""/\//:`~$%#^&"'

1.sed is the script itself and 2.txt is a test file. Run it like this to test:

$ sed -f 1.sed 2.txt
 hello world m 
 this is working 
 as expected 

$ 

Hope this helps.