Skip to content

sed

Stream Editor

sed is a utility that allows us to edit a stream of data by replacing some existing text with the desired one.

Version

  • sed -V prints the sed version
  • sed -h prints a summary of the sed command

Basic command

  • Basic sed command to substitute characters is sed 's|pattern to match|pattern to replace the matched pattern|'
  • a more common form is to use / instead of |: sed 's/pattern to match/pattern to replace the matched pattern/'
  • there are always three / or |, or any other delimiter like :; but there should always be three otherwise an error is raised
  • it is common to use a delimiter that is not a character in the input string being processed
  • for instance, echo day | sed 's|day|night|' produces night
  • sed works on every line, one by one and acts on the first match (greedy)

Regular Expressions

  • regular expressions work perfectly fine for the pattern to match (however, \d does not work, use [0-9] instead)
    • echo "abc 123 abc 456" | sed 's/[0-9][0-9]*/& &/' outputs abc 123 123 abc 456
    • echo "abc 123 abc 456" | sed 's/[0-9]*/& &/' outputs abc 123 abc 456 because [0-9]* matches 0 or more characters and the start of line is a match; [0-9][0-9]* matches a string only made up of digits
  • to use + character in the regular expression search, use -r flag to signify extended regular expressions
    • echo "abc 123 abc 456" | sed -r 's:[0-9]+:& &:' outputs abc 123 123 abc 456
    • in the extended regex setup, we dont need to escape capturing brackets with a \
  • For single matches, & can be used to refer to the matched pattern
    • echo "123 abc" | sed 's/[0-9]*/& &/' gives 123 123 abc
  • Like regular expressions, we can \1 upto \9 (9 captured groups) to refer back to any matched group
    • echo ab1e | sed -r 's/([a-z]+)/\1\1/' outputs abab1e
  • the captured group can be referred to in the search expression as well, say to check duplicated words
    • echo ab abe | sed -r 's/([a-z]+) \1/dup/' outputs dupe
    • echo ab ae | sed -r 's/([a-z]+) \1/dup/' outputs ab ae

Flags and Options

  • -r
    • extended regular expressions; described in the previous section
  • g
    • to change all the occurrences of a word on the line, use the g flag sed s/pattern/replacement/g
    • echo ab1e | sed -r 's/([a-z]+)/9/g' outputs 919
  • I
    • performs case insensitive matching
    • echo abcABCaBc | sed 's/abc/1/gI' outputs 111
  • -n
    • is no printing, with just -n nothing will be printed
  • p
    • specifically asks sed to print the modified lines
    • if no match is found, the lines are printed as is
    • for any line, if a match is found, the line is printed twice
    • -n together with p will print only the lines where a match is found
    • printf "abc\nABC" | sed -n 's/abc/1/p' outputs 1
    • printf "abc\nABC" | sed 's/abc/1/p' outputs 1\n1
  • -e
    • allows executing multiple sed commands sequentially
    • printf "Ah! How do you do good sir this fine evening?" | sed -e 's/e/E/g' -e 's/o/O/g' -e 's/E/e/' outputs Ah! HOw dO yOu dO gOOd sir this fine EvEning?
    • note how the last executed command changes the first E back to e
    • one can also put different commands on separate lines using \ like in a shell script

Ranges and Specifying Lines

  • Restrict to a line number
    • Add the line number before the command to act only on that line
    • sed 'num s/pattern/replace/
    • printf "abc\nABC\naBc" | sed '2 s/abc/replace/I' 
      abc
replace
aBc
  • Ranges by line number
    • Use two comma separated numbers instead of a single number like above to define a range for making substituitions
    • only substitute in first 10 lines, sed '1,10 s/pat/rep/'
    • only substitute in lines 10 to 20, sed '10,20 s/pat/rep/'
    • only substitute in lines 20 to end, sed '10,$ s/pat/rep/'
    • $ denotes the end, similar to other utilities in shell
    • in case multiple files are being processed, the line numbers are assumed to be cumulative

Addresses

sed has the ability to only apply the commands to lines that match a specific pattern using the sed /pattern/ command syntax. * sed -n '/abc/ p mimics grep; the command we are asking sed to execute is p * there should always be a command to execute, otherwise an error is raised

Specific Use Cases

  • a use case of sed is to print the columns header of a file on different lines
    • echo 'colA|colB|colC|colD' | sed -e 's/|/\n/g' | cat -n where | was the column delimiter 
      1  colA
2  colB
3  colC
4  colD
    • cat -n prints the contents and the line numbers as well
  • Another useful usecase is to print specific lines of a file
    • `sed '20,25p' filename
    • This will print lines 20-25 of filename

Reference