How to substitute shell variables in complex text files

I know this topic is old, but I have a simpler working solution without exporting the variables. Can be a oneliner, but I prefer to split using \ on line end.

var1='myVar1'\
var2=2\
var3=${var1}\
envsubst '$var1,$var3' < "source.txt" > "destination.txt"

#         ^^^^^^^^^^^    ^^^^^^^^^^     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
# define which to replace   input            output

The variables need to be defined to the same line as envsubst is to get considered as environment variables.

The '$var1,$var3' is optional to only replace the specified ones. Imagine an input file containing ${VARIABLE_USED_BY_JENKINS} which should not be replaced.

In reference to answer 2, when discussing envsubst, you asked:

How can I make it work with the variables that are declared in my .sh script?

The answer is you simply need to export your variables before calling envsubst.

You can also limit the variable strings you want to replace in the input using the envsubst SHELL_FORMAT argument (avoiding the unintended replacement of a string in the input with a common shell variable value - e.g. $HOME).

For instance:

export VAR1='somevalue' VAR2='someothervalue'
MYVARS='$VAR1:$VAR2'

envsubst "$MYVARS" <source.txt >destination.txt

Will replace all instances of $VAR1 and $VAR2 (and only VAR1 and VAR2) in source.txt with 'somevalue' and 'someothervalue' respectively.

Looking, it turns out on my system there is an envsubst command which is part of the gettext-base package.

So, this makes it easy:

envsubst < "source.txt" > "destination.txt"

Note if you want to use the same file for both, you'll have to use something like moreutil's sponge, as suggested by Johnny Utahh: envsubst < "source.txt" | sponge "source.txt". (Because the shell redirect will otherwise empty the file before its read.)