regex - How to replace all non whitespace characters except one (semicolon)?

Question

I have following regex in perl for replacing all continuous non-whitespace characters

perl -p -i.bak -e 's/^set gamma=\S*/set gamma=GAMMA/' tmp;

If the tmp file contains set gamma=sdjfskdf; #comment then I want to preserve the semicolon along with the comment. But using \S* deletes sdjfskdf;.

What change should I make to the regex?

Answer 1

Try s/^set gamma=[^;\s]*/set gamma=GAMMA/

Answer 2

In your expression you can replace \S* with [^\s;]*, which doesn't match spaces nor ;.