How to use the NUL character as a separator in sed substitute and delete commands?

This is what I tried, when intending to replace /path/to/a with /path/to/b using NUL as the separator/delimiter: $ cat pathsList| sed -r -e 's\0/path/to/a\0/path/to/b\0g' sed: -e expression #1, char 27: number option to `s' command may not be zero **My wanting to go for NUL:** NUL and / are the only characters that are disallowed on ext4fs, and / is already used heavily as the pathname separator. Also, I want to avoid quoting and unquoting my data just to be able to used sed. If NUL can't be used as a delimiter (let's say), I'll be okay with any workaround better than quoting and unquoting of my data. $ sed --version sed (GNU sed) 4.4