4.42. How do I replace "/some/UNIX/path" in a substitution?

Technically, the normal meaning of the slash can be disabled by prefixing it with a backslash. Thus,

     sed 's/\/some\/UNIX\/path/\/a\/new\/path/g' files

But this is hard to read and write. There is a better solution. The s/// substitution command allows '/' to be replaced by any other character (including spaces or alphanumerics). Thus,

     sed 's|/some/UNIX/path|/a/new/path|g' files

and if you are using variable names in a Unix shell script,

     sed "s|$OLDPATH|$NEWPATH|g" oldfile >newfile