Text Replace, brackets

[serathigeos]

I want to replace every occurance of "[0:12:#abc():34]" with
"#abc(34)", but the following is not doing the trick:
perl -pi~ -e 's/[0:12:#abc():34]/#abc(34)/g' file.txt

How can I replace literal brackets? []
-Brendan

 

[columb]

YOu need to escape certtain characters, typically []()/\ and . You might also have problems with the #.
So try

perl -pi~ -e 's/\[0:12:\#abc\(\):34\]/\#abc\(34\)/g' file.tx

Columb Healy

 

[KevinADC]

just use Q\...\E:

perl -pi~ -e 's/\Q[0:12:#abc():34]\E/\#abc(34)/g' file.tx

Q\...E\ automatically escapes the meta characters in a regexp to avoid interpolation of their special meaning. You would need to escape the [] and () otherwise because they have special meaning in a regexp as Columb noted.