> But now I would like to port it to bash ... bash doesn't have regex search and replace but sed does

Why do you want to port it to bash?

The wise coder won't shell out to grep, awk or sed
Since no JAPH would be seen doing that, dead

-- from hippo's classic poem The wise coder

Unix shell versus Perl argues strongly that it's better to write everything in Perl, rather than a motley mix of shell, grep, sed, awk and so on -- so please tell us why you want to port a working perl script to bash.

I've added your question to my list of Shell to Perl References.

👁️🍾👍🦟