Replace all \\ with / in files and subdirs

Question

i need a quick command (linux or windows) to replace every \\ with a /, and all tries with sed failed because of the /. (I already tried find . -name '*.*' -exec sed -i 's/\\///g' {} \;, but i think it failed with the "/".

You tagged Python here. I believe that if you actually use the `os` module, this *should* all be taken care of for you when providing the respective path on that platform. — idjaw, Mar 19 '17 at 16:39
Also, for whatever case you are doing this for, there are several solutions out there that do this for you in many different ways. Have you tried all solutions out there? — idjaw, Mar 19 '17 at 16:41
There would have been a `sed` syntax error for the unescaped literal slash. — tripleee, Mar 19 '17 at 16:51
@tripleee: No, it said it replaced some things, but it didn't — Lea Eichelsdörfer, Mar 20 '17 at 17:00
@idjaw: No, the problem is a "\\\\", what works on windows, but not on linux — Lea Eichelsdörfer, Mar 20 '17 at 17:07

GKFX · Accepted Answer · 2017-03-20T21:05:53.293

1

find . -name '*.*' -type f -exec sed -i 's:\\\\:/:g' {} \;

You need to escape each backslash, and using a colon or comma as separators is generally recommended when making replacements with forward-slash. However, escaping the forward slash works too:

find . -name '*.*' -type f -exec sed -i 's/\\\\/\//g' {} \;

As pointed out in comments the OS module is probably what you really need to look at.

Edit: thanks to @tripleee for reminding me of the -type f line, which limits it to files, rather than including the current directory.

Also, I copied the syntax *.* from the OP but in general it isn't helpful. * alone is usually what you want, since files aren't guaranteed to have a dot in their name. Assuming you were happy to include files not containing a dot, the simplest thing to do here is have no -name at all:

find . -type f -exec sed -i 's:\\\\:/:g' {} \;

edited Mar 20 '17 at 21:05

answered Mar 19 '17 at 16:46

GKFX

1,386
1
11
30

@tdelaney OP doesn't want that, they've made it clear in the title and comment they want two backslashes to be replaced, not one. – GKFX Mar 19 '17 at 16:59
@tdelaney I quote OP: `I meant \\, but it was replaced :(` – GKFX Mar 19 '17 at 17:03
1

Okay, I sse. I assumed that comment referred to the code example and that OP had fixed it by the time I got here. – tdelaney Mar 19 '17 at 17:09
I get an error when I try this `Cannot process . :That's not a normal file ` (I hope I translated it right) – Lea Eichelsdörfer Mar 20 '17 at 17:05
1

You'll want to add a `-type f` to the `find` command line, before the `-exec`. – tripleee Mar 20 '17 at 17:21
@tripleee Thanks! I'd meant to look up that switch and add it but forgot. It's now in the answer. – GKFX Mar 20 '17 at 21:06

Replace all \\ with / in files and subdirs

1 Answers1