Sed by examples, Part 2
sed (stream editor) is a Unix utility which (a) parses text files and (b) implements a programming language which can apply textual transformations to such files.
It reads input files line by line (sequentially), applying the operation which has been specified via the command line (or a sed script), and then outputs the line.
Substitution
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Substitute, for every line, the first occurence of foo (if any) with spam:
# test.txt foo bar spam foo spam foo bar egg sausage foo spam egg spam spam spamsed -e 's/foo/spam/' test.txt
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Substitute every occurence of foo with spam:
sed -e 's/foo/spam/g' test.txt
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Substitute every occurence of foo with spam in the first two lines:
sed -e '1,2s/foo/spam/g' test.txt
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Substitute every occurence of foo with spam in every line that starts with sausage and ends with egg:
sed -e '/^sausage.*egg$/s/foo/spam/g' test.txt
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Substitute paths:
sed -e 's|/usr/bin/|/usr/local/bin|g' script.sh
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Remove html tags:
<html> <body> Hello World! </body> </html>
sed -e 's/<[^>]*>//g' hello.html
Advanced substitution
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Append (that’s what she said) to every line ( & represents what matches):
sed -e "s/^.*$/& (that's what she said)/g" test.txt
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Append lol, rofl and lmao to the first three words of every line:
sed -e 's/\(^[^ ]*\) \([^ ]*\) \([^ ]*\)/\1lol \2rofl \3lmao/' test.txt
Multiple Commands
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Print a file alternating row numbers:
sed -n -e '=;p' test.txt
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Print some information about your cpu first core:
# script.sed 1,/^$/{ /model name/p /flags/p /bogomips/p }
sed -n -f script.sed /proc/cpuinfo
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Add a line before/after each line or replace line:
# script.sed i\ This line will be inserted before each line# script.sed a\ This line will be inserted after each line# script.sed c\ This line will be inserted in each line
sed -f script.sed test.txt



