mjhjmtu

I have file "list.txt" containing absolute paths to other files

/home/lin/bash/aaa
/home/lin/bash/song.mp3
/home/lin/bash/doc.html
/home/lin/bash/directory

I want to assign path to variable

path="/home/lin/bash/song.mp3"

and then remove whole line with that path. I've tried

sed -i '$path' list.txt

and many other command with grep, echo but nothing works.

There are two problems with your solution. First since you're using single quotes for '$path' this expression is treated literally, and not like the variable $path. In order to solve this use double quotes "$path". But then you will face the second problem: you want to use slash / as a special sed-symbol and at the same time this symbol is present in paths, which will confuse sed. Therefore you have to use some other symbol instead of slash, for example, use comma

$ sed -i "s,$path,," list.txt
$ cat list.txt
/home/lin/bash/aaa

/home/lin/bash/doc.html
/home/lin/bash/directory

There is another beautiful approach, suggested by Tim Kennedy (see explanation of how it works in the discussion below), which does not leave the blank line

$ sed -i ",$path,d" list.txt
$ cat list.txt
/home/lin/bash/aaa
/home/lin/bash/doc.html
/home/lin/bash/directory

Try grep approach once again - it'll work:

grep -xv "$path" list.txt > tmp_$$ && mv tmp_$$ list.txt

The final list.txt contents:

/home/lin/bash/aaa
/home/lin/bash/doc.html
/home/lin/bash/directory

You could do this with GNU sed and double qoutes to expand the variable.

sed -i.bak ":^$path$:d" list.txt

• Here we used -i to have in-place replace/deletion of matched patters as in $path, the .bak is taking a backup of original list.txt file with to list.txt.bak
  


• We used different separator to prevent failing sed with slashes / in $path will contain.


• We used start of line ^ and end of line $ anchors to match the path in whole line not partially if matched.


• 
  

  We escaped opening first delimiter as it's mandatory when delimiter is other than slash /. in man sed documented.

  
  
  

  cregexpc
   Match lines matching the regular expression regexp.
   The c may be any character.
  

  
  
  

  actually this is telling sed that next character is our delimiter.