Try patch instead of sed in shell scripts

A script is better seen than sed

I'd like to offer all of the shell scripters out there an alternative to sed replacements: patch.

Patch has several important benefits:

• Context for all changes
• Easy backup via the -b flag
• Easy rollback
• Easy multi-line replacements

Sed is great but can often times lead to enigmatic behavior. This is especially true when using wildcard expressions or other shell magic. And as the saying goes, code is read more often than it is written, so you should write for readability.

Here's a common type of sed replacement you'll find in any old off-the-shelf shell script:

# Replace some mystery var with this one
sed -i 's/setting_foo: */setting_foo: 5'

This kind of thing makes sense to the author, but the reader is at a disadvantage. What is the original value of setting_foo? What type of setting is it and why change it? These are things that are lost in translation with these commands.

And it can easily and often times be worse:

sed -ie 's/[]\/$*.^|[]/\\&/g' file

Here's a real example of updating a mysql.conf. Since multiple lines potentially start with port, you need to use a regular expression to match the word and whitespace to prevent accidents. Also, it's difficult to maintain the original justification of the file. And who knows what the original values were

# Change the port. Since this argument appears on several lines, we only want to change the first one
sed -ie '0,/^port\s*=\s*/port        = 8000/' /etc/mysql

# Change port using whitespace
sed -i 's/max_allowed_packet             = 16M/max_allowed_packet             = 32M/' /etc/mysql

# Allow more packets
sed -ie 's/^max_allowed_packet\s*=*/max_allowed_packet = 32M/' /etc/mysql.conf

Pretty ugly.

Now compare these same changes with patch

patch -b /etc/mysql.conf <<PATCH
--- mysql.conf_old    2015-07-20 19:53:25.000000000 -0700
+++ mysql.conf        2015-07-20 19:58:28.000000000 -0700
@@ -8,14 +8,14 @@

 [client]

-port                           = 3306
+port                           = 8000
 socket                         = /var/run/mysqld/mysql.sock


 [mysql]

 no_auto_rehash
-max_allowed_packet             = 16M
+max_allowed_packet             = 32M
 prompt                         = '\u@\h [\d]> '
 default_character_set          = utf8                                # Possibly this setting is correct for most recent Linux systems
PATCH

Clean and simple! You can see we've obviously added more lines to the script, but we have context to our changes. We've also used the -b flag to automatically backup the file.

Closing thoughts

Of course this isn't always ideal. A good example is when you don't actually know the value that you're replacing. But nevertheless I think it's a good alternative that should be used when readability is important.