Sed – Replace Regex Capture Group Content

sed

I'm trying to edit my nginx.conf file programmatically, which contains a line like this:

        access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;

which I want to look like this:

        access_log /dev/stdout;

I believe the regex ^\s*access_log([^;]*); will capture the /var/log/nginx/access.log part in a capture group, but I'm not sure how to correctly replace the capture group with sed?

I've tried 

echo "        access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;" | sed 's/^\s*access_log([^;]*);/\1\\\/dev\\\/stdout/'

but I'm getting the error:

sed: -e expression #1, char 45: invalid reference \1 on `s' command's RHS

if I try sed -r then there is no error, but the output is not what I expect:

 /var/log/nginx/access.log\/dev\/stdout

I'm trying to be smart with the capture group and whatnot and not search directly for "access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;" in case the distribution changes the default log file location.

Best Answer

A couple of mistakes there.

First, since sed uses basic regular expressions, you need \( and \) to make a capture group. The -r switch enables extended regular expressions which is why you don't get the error. See Why do I need to escape regex characters in sed to be interpreted as regex characters?.

Second, you are putting the capture group in the wrong place. If I understand you correctly, you can do this:

sed -e 's!^\(\s*access_log\)[^;]*;!\1 /dev/stdout;!' your_file

Note the use of ! as regex delimiters to avoid having to escape the forward slashes in /dev/stdout.

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