sed

Sed is a stream editor. It is it's own Domain Specific Language.

s for substitution

Uses regex, changes "day" to "night" from file "old" into file "new":

sed s/day/night/ < old >new

sed is line oriented:

# file
one two three, one two three
four three two one
one hundred

sed 's/one/ONE' <file

ONE two three, one two three
four three two ONE
ONE hundred

• s substitute command
• /../../ Delimiter
• one Regular Expression
• ONE replacement string
• ' ' quoting will take meta-characters, good practice

Slash Delimiter is a convention

Say you need to search with slashes for file directories. It is advantageous to use another character, say _. Any character works, as long as it's 3 delimiters.

& is a matched string

Say you want to put brackets around a word. & is a special character for the string that you matched. sed s/[a-z]*/(&)/ <old >new

-r for extended Regular Expression

For more advanced regex, like + meta-character. sed -r 's/../../'

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