sed

sed is a stream editor utility which supports insertion, deletion, and search and replace of streams then prints the edited stream to standard output.

$ sed OPTIONS... [SCRIPT] [INPUTFILE...]

Useful Options / Examples

sed 's/FindWord/ReplaceWord/' filename > outfile

$ sed 's/Nick/Josh/' names.txt > out.txt

Changes first instances of ‘Nick’ in names.txt to ‘Josh’ and prints output to out.txt

sed 's/FindWord/ReplaceWord/g' filename > outfile

$ sed 's/Nick/Josh/g' names.txt > out.txt

Changes all instances of ‘Nick’ in names.txt to ‘Josh’ and prints output to out.txt

sed 'nd' filename

$ sed '5d' filename.txt

Deletes the 5th line from filename.txt

Options

Option Description
–help Display a help message and exit.
–version Output version information and exit.
-n –quiet –silent Disables automatic printing.
-e script –expression=script Add commands in script to set of commands to be run when processing input.
-f script-file –file=script-file Add commands in script-file to set of commands to be run when processing input.
-i[SUFFIX] –in-place[=SUFFIX] Specifies editing files in place.
-l N –line-length=N Specifies line-wrap length (default = 70).
-posix  
-b –binary Opens files in binary mode.
–follow-symlinks Specifies that file passed in is a symbolic link.
-E -r –regexp-extended Use extended regular expressions.
-s –separate Consider files as separate streams.
–sandbox Specifies that sed does not run any external programs.
-u –unbuffered Buffer both input and output as minimally as practical.
-z –null-data –zero-terminated Treat each line as null-terminated instead of newline-terminated.