How to include forward slash in vi search & replace

Question

I have a file that contains the string usrbin. I want to search for usrbin and replace it with /usr/bin/.

I tried :%s/usrbin/usr/bin/g, but it's showing error E488: Trailing characters.

How do I include a forward slash in a search and replace?

Solution

Here are two ways:

• escape the / which is the default substitute separator: :s/usrbin/\/usr\/bin
• use another substitute separator, e.g., using the hash # character: :s#usrbin#/usr/bin. Note that there are characters that you can't use as a separator: ", \, |

You can review this in the help subsystem using :h pattern-delimiter

Comments

[glerYbo]

possible duplicate of How does one escape backslashes and forward slashes in VIM find/search?

[Musa Haidari]

possible duplicate of / in vi Search and replace?

[pb2q]

thanks @CiroSantilli包子露宪六四事件法轮功! I added edits. Comment if you can think of any other characters that can't be used as alternate delimiters

[jurgenb]

great answer, this is ideal if you want to replace a long URL value because escaping all those forward slashes is no fun at all

[Kajukenbo]

There are problems with | (pipe) as the delimiter when replacing backslashes such as "PATH=C:\Windows\System32;C:\Temp;C:\Users" via :s|\\|/|g but I never figured out why so I just use # as a delimiter instead

[jdhao]

FYI, the relevant vim help on this topic is :h pattern-delimiter.