tldr/pages/common/sed.md

sed

Edit text in a scriptable manner. More information: https://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/sed.html.

• Replace the first occurrence of a regular expression in each line of a file, and print the result:

sed 's/{{regular_expression}}/{{replace}}/' {{filename}}

• Replace all occurrences of an extended regular expression in a file, and print the result:

sed -r 's/{{regular_expression}}/{{replace}}/g' {{filename}}

• Replace all occurrences of a string in a file, overwriting the file (i.e. in-place):

sed -i 's/{{find}}/{{replace}}/g' {{filename}}

• Replace only on lines matching the line pattern:

sed '/{{line_pattern}}/s/{{find}}/{{replace}}/' {{filename}}

• Delete lines matching the line pattern:

sed '/{{line_pattern}}/d' {{filename}}

• Print the first 11 lines of a file:

sed 11q {{filename}}

• Apply multiple find-replace expressions to a file:

sed -e 's/{{find}}/{{replace}}/' -e 's/{{find}}/{{replace}}/' {{filename}}

• Replace separator / by any other character not used in the find or replace patterns, e.g. #:

sed 's#{{find}}#{{replace}}#' {{filename}}