Sed Cookbook
03/31/2011
The Linux sed command is a stream editor. What that means is basically that you can do a regex operation on each line of a file or a piped stream. You can also use perl like sed.
Sed does not use the extended regex syntax. Sed regex reminders:
- You need a backslash before parens in a regex grouping
- You refer to matched regex groups using \1, \2, etc.
- The + regex operator does not work
- Non-greedy quantifiers don’t work. For example, .*? will not work
- The output is printed to standard out by default. You need the -i option if you want to edit a file with sed.
Remove all but the first column in a .tsv stream
sed 's/\([^\t]*\).*/\1/'
Edit a .tsv file by removing all but the first column
sed -i 's/\([^\t]*\).*/\1/'
Remove the first line of a stream
sed '1d'
Strip trailing whitespace from a file
sed -i -e 's/ *$//'
Recursively replace tabs with spaces
grep -Plr '\t' src/ | xargs sed -i 's/\t/ /g'
Replace @inheritDoc with @override after marking for edit
grep -l -r @inheritDoc java/com/benmccann | xargs p4 edit
grep -l -r @inheritDoc java/com/benmccann | xargs sed -i 's/\(.*\)@inheritDoc/\1@override/'
Replace @inheritDoc with @override in JS files after marking for edit
find java/com/benmccann -name '*.js' -print0 | xargs -0 grep -l @inheritDoc | xargs p4 edit find java/com/benmccann -name '*.js' -print0 | xargs -0 grep -l @inheritDoc | xargs sed -i 's/\(.*\)@inheritDoc/\1@override/'
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