Sed

sed is a command to edit a text stream in batch mode.

For example,

sed "s/a/o/"

Will read your input (stream) from the keyboard and substitute every a by an o.

Usecases

• Remove leading white space

sed 's/^[ \t]*//'

• Replace strings

sed -e "s/cgi?\([0-9][0-9]*\)/cgi@\1.html/g" myfile.html > index.html

• Insert a line a beginning of file

sed -i '1i <This is now at the first line>' <filename>

• Replace several newlines by one

sed 's/\ \{1,\}/\ /g'

Limitations

You cannot use sed to delete linebreaks, for this you must use tr.

See also

• piping
• grep
• regex