/ in vi Search and replace?

Question

in vi, search and replace, how do you escape a '/' (forward slash) so that it is correct. Say in a path.

like: /Users/tom/documents/pdfs/

:%s//Users/tom/documents/pdfs//<new text>/g  --FAILS (obviously)

:%s/\/Users/tom/documents/pdfs\//<new text>/g -- FAILS with a trailing error

:%s/'/Users/tom/documents/pdfs/'/<new text>/g -- FAILS with a trailing error

What am I missing?

Answer 1

You need to escape the forward slashes internally, too.

:%s/\/Users\/tom\/documents\/pdfs\//<new text>/g

Answer 2

Alternatively you can do :%s,foo/bar/baz,foo/bar/boz,g - I almost never use slashes because of the escaping confusion.

Answer 3

As Sarah suggested, you need to escape ALL forward slashes.

You could instead use another character besides forward-slash as the delimiter. This is handy if your search string has a lot of slashes in it.

:%s#/Users/tom/documents/pdfs/#<new test>#g

This works perfectly in vim. I'm not 100% sure about vanilla vi.