How do I push `sed` matches to the shell call in the replacement pattern?

Posted by rassie on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by rassie
Published on 2010-05-01T16:54:12Z Indexed on 2010/05/01 16:57 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 238

Filed under:

I need to replace several URLs in a text file with some content dependent on the URL itself. Let's say for simplicity it's the first line of the document at the URL.

What I'm trying is this:

sed "s/^URL=\(.*\)/TITLE=$(curl -s \1 | head -n 1)/" file.txt

This doesn't work, since \1 is not set. However, the shell is getting called. Can I somehow push the sed match variables to that subprocess?

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about sed