How to replace first occurence of a string in another string

[Ashwin Sridhar]

Hi All,

I am trying to read the value from a property file and capture the value into a variable. My property file is a key value pair separted by '=' sign. So in script I replace the values before '=' with empty space and I get the value. Now I have a problem where my value apart also contains '=' sign and when I execute the script my data becomes null. Below is the code i use.

test1=`sed '/^\#/d' appl.properties | grep "test1" | sed 's/^.*=//'`

My Property file entry is

test1=%ENC%_ftYvcVFNwNw\=

Could anyone let me know how to replace only the first occurence of the string?

[Richard Tookey]

Your expression looks more complex than I would expect but to deal with the immediate problem I think you need to make the second sed expression use a reluctant .* . i.e. 's/^.*?=//' . Does 'sed' allow reluctant qualifiers ? Doesn't seem to !

Edit : Since 'sed' does not seem to support reluctant qualifiers I created a perl version -

test1=$(cat appl.properties | grep "^test1=" | perl -e '$_ = <STDIN>; s/^.*?=//; print')

[Tim Holloway]

If I got that correctly:

sed -e "s/^.*=//" xxxx.properties