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I've binary file consisting double float (8 bytes) or just float (4 bytes) value which was generated in the following way: $ python -c $'from struct import pack\nwith open("file.bin", "wb") as f: f.write(pack("<d", 0.123))' $ xxd file.bin 00000000: b072 6891 ed7c bf3f .rh..|.? which I could print it back from Python via: $ python -c $'from struct import unpack\nwith open("file.bin", "rb") as f: print(unpack("<d", f.read(8)))' (0.123,) The same for 4-byte float, just change <d into <f (mentioned as float.bin later on). How do I print that value from the shell script using cleaner way (without

Say we have some arbitrary literals in a file that we need to replace with some other literal. Normally, we'd just reach for sed (1) or awk (1) and code something like: sed "s/$target/$replacement/g" file.txt But what if the $target and/or $replacement could contain characters that are sensitive to sed (1) such as regular expressions. You could escape them but suppose you don't know what they are - they are arbitrary, ok? You'd need to code up something to escape all possible sensitive characters - including the '/' separator. eg t=$( echo "$target" | sed 's/\./\\./g; s/\*/\\*/g; s/\[/\\[/g; .