unix - Interpret as fixed string/literal and not regex using sed

Question

For grep there's a fixed string option, -F (fgrep) to turn off regex interpretation of the search string. Is there a similar facility for sed? I couldn't find anything in the man. A recommendation of another gnu/linux tool would also be fine.

I'm using sed for the find and replace functionality: sed -i "s/abc/def/g"

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4133286/interpret-as-fixed-string-literal-and-not-regex-using-sed

Answer 1

You should be using replace instead of sed.

From the man page:

   The replace utility program changes strings in place in files or on the
   standard input.

   Invoke replace in one of the following ways:

       shell> replace from to [from to] ... -- file_name [file_name] ...
       shell> replace from to [from to] ... < file_name

   from represents a string to look for and to represents its replacement.
   There can be one or more pairs of strings.