The short story is I want to find a string in a file and change it. Here are the details. I'm looking for a way to change every occurence of $source to "JavTemp" in a file called JavTemp2.java. $source is a variable. This is what I've got: sed s/$source/JavTemp/g JavTemp2.java > JavTemp.java The problem, of course, is that sed recognizes $source as a pattern rather than a variable. Is there a way to make sed behave the way I want or is there a better tact? Thanks for any help you can offer.

Have you tried escaping the $ with a \ ? sed s/\$source/JavTemp/g JavTemp2.java > JavTemp.java

Yes. It didn't work.

sed 's/$source/JavTemp/g' JavTemp2.java > JavTemp.java -jim

Nope. I'm wondering if this a Mac problem. Does this work on other systems?

After reading the post again, i realized that $source is a variable, not a string. If you want to perform variable substitution with sed, then enclose the expresion in double quotes. source="some string" sed "s/$source/JavTemp/g" JavTemp2.java > JavTemp.java -jim

Actually, I already have it in qoutes. source="$1" $source gets it's value from the command line. I've also tried a million different qouting combinations in the sed expression to no avail. sed "s/$source/JavTemp/g" JavTemp2.java > JavTemp.java sed 's/"$source"/JavTemp/g' JavTemp2.java > JavTemp.java sed "s/\$source/JavTemp/g" JavTemp2.java > JavTemp.java etc... Maybe sed is the wrong command for this type of thing.