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Cover image for Living in the Shell #14; sed (Text Stream Editor) (Part 1)
Babak K. Shandiz
Babak K. Shandiz

Posted on • Originally published at babakks.github.io on

Living in the Shell #14; sed (Text Stream Editor) (Part 1)

#productivity #linux #bash #devops

sed 🖊️

Edits streams by applying commonly used modifications.

Add a new line a & i 

cat some-file.txt | sed '3a This is a new line after the 3rd line' 
cat some-file.txt | sed '3i This is a new line before the 3rd line'
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Append a new line to the end $a 

cat some-file.txt | sed '$a Now, this is the last line'
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Prepend a new line to the beginning 1i 

cat some-file.txt | sed '1i Now, this is the first line'
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Replace one or more lines c 

cat some-file.txt | sed '1-3c BOOM'
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Replaces lines 1 through 3, with 'BOOM'.

Delete one or more lines d 

cat some-file.txt | sed '1-3d'
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Deletes lines 1 through 3.

Top comments (2)

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cubikca profile image
Brian Richardson •

These were some uses of sed I wasn't aware of, thanks. Still, the true power of sed must be acknowledged to be its replacement capabilities using regular expressions. For example, search and replace within a directory:

find . -name \*.js -exec cat {} | sed -e 's#replaceme#replacement#g' > output.txt

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babakks profile image
Babak K. Shandiz •

That's right. I'll cover some use cases of string/pattern substitution in Part 2.

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