How can I add a backslash before all spaces?

Question

How can I put a backslash before every space, preferably by using tr or sed commands?

Here is my script:

#!/bin/bash
line="hello bye"
echo $line | tr ' ' "\\\ "

This is supposed to replace spaces with a backslash followed by a space, but it's only replacing the spaces with a backslash and not backlash+space.

This is the output I get:

hello\bye

Expected output:

hello\ bye

Solution 1

tr can't do multiple characters. Use one of these instead:

1. sed

   echo "$line" | sed 's/ /\\ /g' 
   

   or

   sed 's/ /\\ /g' <<< "$line"
   

2. Perl

   echo "$line" | perl -pe 's/ /\\ /g'  
   

   or

   perl -pe 's/ /\\ /g'<<< "$line"
   

   Perl also has a nifty function called quotemeta which can escape all odd things in a string:

   line='@!#$%^&*() _+"'
   perl -ne 'print quotemeta($_)' <<< $line
   

   The above will print

   \@\!\#\$\%\^\&\*\(\)\ _\+\"\
   

3. You can also use printf and %q:

   %q  quote the argument in a way that can be reused as shell input
   

   So, you could do

   echo "$line" | printf "%q\n" 
   

   Note that this, like Perl's quotemeta will escape all special characters, not just spaces.

   printf "%q\n" <<<$line
   

4. If you have the line in a variable, you could just do it directly in bash:

   echo ${line// /\\ }
   

Solution 2

There is AWK missing in the list of all the possible solutions :)

$ echo "Hello World" | awk '{gsub(/ /,"\\ ");print}'                                                                             
Hello\ World

Comments

[Fabby]

Could you please elaborate a bit on that? Are you looking for a script that changes a text file? What exactly are you looking for?

[daka]

yes this works, but does not work when wanting to replace all occurences of "a" with a backlash+space.

[terdon]

@sudoman I added some more options since you have the line in a variable already.

[evilsoup]

Bash's printf builtin has functionality similar to quotemeta -- printf '%q\n' "$line" should do it IIRC.