escape character in vi – search and replace

as i attempted to edit some installation files to update scripts to point to a different directory than the defaults i realized that i needed to replace a string with one that would have slashes in it – eg. replacing ‘u01’ with ‘somewhere/else’

i then found out that “/” in the search/replace command is just a default and you can replace it with a different character:

%s#u01#somewhere/else#ABC#g

or

%s+u01+somewhere/else+g 

or

%s_u01_somewhere/else_g