Using sed to replace special characters

sed

This works to replace tom with sam in a file:

sed 's/tom/sam/g' file_1 > file_2

But this does not:

sed 's/*****/sam/g' file_1 > file_2

To replace the special characters ***** with the word sam. I have tried with a slash \* but errors.

You need to escape the special characters with a backslash \ in front of the special character, e.g.:

sed 's/\*/t/g' test.txt > test2.txt

Try this,

$ sed 's~<offset xmlns="">1~<offset xmlns="">99~g' file
          <offset xmlns="">99</offset>

Use a different sed delimiter if the input contain slashes.

What you see on the terminal as ^[ is the escape character. The second [ is a [.

You need to include the code for escape.

replace the ^[ with an escape character.

esc="$(echo '\033')"
sed 's/\.gpg'"${esc}"'\[00m$//'

esc='\x1b`
...